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Love Live! The School Idol Movie, released Japan-wide on June 13, has gotten off to a pleasantly surprising start. The movie broke through the 400 million yen box office milestone during its first weekend, making a total of 400,235,800 yen in revenue. The movie opened in 121 theaters, bringing in a total of 251,811 moviegoers, and grabbed the number one spot for box office earnings for the weekend. The movie won out over Umimachi Diary, a competition work in the Cannes Film Festival, the Disney epic Tomorrowland, and the talked-about Japanese films Prophesy and Shinjuku Swan, which opened during the same week as The School Idol Movie.
Moreover, the mid-size release of The School Idol Movie in 121 theaters is quite small when compared to the 323 theaters playing Umimachi Diary, which ranked second for the weekend. The weekend screenings of the movie must have been quite packed everywhere it was playing. With earnings anticipated to increase from here on, it seems likely that the movie will pass with flying colors the standard box office earnings that denote a movie as being a blockbuster: 1 billion yen. The milestone of approximately 2 billion yen also seems to have been set in recent years by Gintama: The Movie: The Final Chapter: Be Forever Yorozuya and Madoka Magica the Movie: Rebellion, both of which are unusually big hits for being animated movies based on late night anime.
Love Live! The School Idol Movie is the first theatrical movie in the hugely popular series. The movie gathered huge attention when production was announced during the final episode of season two of the TV anime broadcast in 2014. The movie even made huge waves on SNS, with “Love Live!” being a trending keyword that showed up constantly on the opening day of the movie, June 13.
With a rebroadcast of the series ongoing since April of this year, Love Live! fans are increasing all the more. It seems with this backing the movie’s box office earnings and attendance rates will continue to increase. During this year in which so many theatrical anime are being release, what kind of impact will this movie leave?
Source: animeanime