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Ponyo Numbers

Well, actual yen figures are now out for Miyazaki's Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (see my previous Ponyo box office post a couple days ago). So, for all the number hounds (who can do their own conversions to greenbacks or whatever currency):

3-day Holiday Weekend Gross: 1,575,817,355 yen on 1,251,207 admissions over the three-day period (July 19-21).

Compared to Spirited Away: Ponyo earned 96.6% of Spirited Away's 3-day take on the exact same holiday weekend in 2001. And in that case the annual Pokemon movie had opened two weeks prior, whereas this year they went head to head. Not nearly as many adults go to see Pokemon films without kids as they would a Studio Ghibli film, but there's still a lot of crossover in family demographics (45.1% of survey takers ticked "kazoku"). Average ticket price was slightly higher in 2001 (1226 yen in 2001 vs. 1216 yen in 2007). Admissions for Ponyo were 101.4% compared to Spirited.

Now, Spirited Away took a full year to earn its 30.4 billion yen. Will Ponyo be able to tread water for that long? In recent years Japan has been moving toward the same kind of "shock and awe" opening weekends of the US, but as we know Miyazaki films create and exist in their own world...

Update: Ponyo's 2-day take was 1,025,562,304 yen, just squeaking past Hana Yori Dango to become the biggest Sat-Sun haul of the year. Keep in mind that the latter wasn't selling cheaper kids tickets. Indy Jones had a bigger number on most charts, but that included the previous weekend's preview screenings.

Update 2: And for all the media outlets (Japanese and English) comparing the first 2 days out of a three-day weekend to the first 2 days of Howl's, released on a normal weekend (with a nat. holiday 2 days later), that math is faulty. I'm not even good at calculations, but the thinking behind a lot of box office math confuses me. It doesn't take a genius to realize that if Ponyo had been released on a regular weekend, the gross would not have been exactly the same. When working people have 3 consecutive days to choose from, it gets spread out. Duh (first use of that word on this blog).

That's it for Ponyo numbers until I cross-post my 2008 box office report around next January.

Posted by Jason Gray at 7/22/2008 08:32:00 PM