Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron is having a high-flying cultural moment. The acclaimed Studio Ghibli and GKIDS’ release is looking at the top position at the U.S. box office with a $10 million-plus wide release after making $2.39 million on Thursday and early access previews. The movie will be duking it out with a other well-reviewed Japanese important Godzilla Minus One, which had an $11.4 box office last weekend.
Billed as the beloved Japanese master’s final movie, The Boy and the Heron is a critics favorite, with a 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes. To date, the film has made over $84 million worldwide, and stands as Japan’s most popular movie of the year with a $56.1 million in box office sales in its home country. All of this is even more remarkable considering the filmmaker didn’t do any interviews and no promotional trailers or images were released before the premiere in July.
Stateside, the movie had a special preview in 1,774 houses beginning at 5 p.m. It will play in 2,205 theaters, and will be the first Ghibli film to be screened in IMAX theaters. The Boy and the Heron had awards-season screenings in New York and L.A. in November during the Thanksgiving weekend.
Industry observers are predicting that the movie will have the biggest opening for a Studio Ghibli film and the widest release for a GKIDS movie. Christian Bale, Dave Bautista, Gemma Chan, Willem Dafoe, Karen Fukuhara, Mark Hamill, Robert Pattinson and Florence Pugh provide the voices for the English-language version of the movie.
Animation fans are hoping that the movie will land on the list of movies nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award (as well as the traditional Best Animated Feature Oscar). The time seems to be right for this to happen. To date, three movies have been able to break the animation-live-action barrier: Beauty and the Beast (1991), Up (2009) and Toy Story 3 (2010). The Boy and the Heron was already picked as one of the Best Movies of the Year by the AFI and the National Board of Review and has been landing on top of many critics’ best-of lists.
You can read our story about the instant classic here.
Watch the English-language trailer below:
Source: Deadline.com
