Japan Box Office Falls by (Only) 45% in 2020, Data Shows myjournalcourier.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from myjournalcourier.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (MPPA) announced the 2020 National Film Overview, a summary of Japan s box office from last year, on Wednesday.
The number of movie theater attendees in 2020 was 106.137 million, which is down 45.5% from 2019. Box office revenue was 143.285 billion yen (about US$1.4 billion), which is down 45.1% from 2019. The data reflects the effects of restricted seating and movie theater closures.
The box office revenues for overseas films in Japan was 34.009 billion yen (about US$327 million), a decrease of 71.4% from 2019. Japanese movies revenues decreased by 23.1% from 2019 to 109.276 billion yen (about US$1 billion). The ratio of Japanese movie revenues to the total rose from 54.4% in 2019 to 76.3% in 2020.
“Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie Mugen Train” became Japan s top-earning film of all time within only about two months of its release. Photo taken in front of a Tokyo cinema in October. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
Though movie fans flocked to Demon Slayer in 2020, turning it into Japan s highest-grossing film of all time, box office revenue plunged to its lowest level since 2000 when comparable figures became available.
Japan’s 2020 box office earnings totaled a paltry 143.3 billion yen ($1.37 billion), a sharp fall of 117.9 billion yen from the record set in the previous year, according to an announcement on Jan. 27 by the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan Inc. (MPPAJ).
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train
Thanks to the chaos COVID-19 has wrought on Hollywood release schedules, U.S. films took their lowest share of Japan s box office in modern times. Western movies brought in just $328 million, down 71 percent.
The Japanese box office plummeted more than 45 percent in 2020 after the novel coronavirus pandemic briefly shuttered cinemas in the country and weighed on moviegoing throughout much of the year.
Total ticket sales revenue clocked in at $1.38 billion (143.3 billion yen), down from $2.39 billion (261 billion yen) in 2019, which had set an all-time record.
The results place Japan just behind North America, which had $2.3 billion in sales, as the world s third-biggest theatrical film territory. For the first time ever, China, which made a rapid recovery from the pandemic in the fourth quarter of 2020, assumed the top spot, generating $3.13 billion in ticket sales.