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The anime film ‘Chiikawa: The Secret of Mermaid Island’ surpassed 11.33 million admissions and ¥16.52 billion in box office revenue over its 62-day run, climbing to 15th place on Japan’s all-time box office chart. It’s just one step behind 14th-place ‘THE FIRST SLAM DUNK’ (¥16.67 billion), and it’s already the No. 1 grossing film of 2026. On 5ch, reactions were split over how to read the numbers — some pointed to the huge stack of admission bonuses (nyujosha tokuten) driving repeat viewings, others admitted to doing a total 180 after once being skeptical of the franchise, and some wondered whether it’s enjoyable without knowing the source material.
Sep 24 (Thu) 15:43
Box office figures for the anime film “Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of Mermaid Island” (released July 24) were announced, showing it surpassed 11.33 million admissions and ¥16.52 billion in revenue over its 62-day theatrical run. It’s already the No. 1 grossing film released in 2026, and ranks 15th on the all-time box office chart. In 14th place is “THE FIRST SLAM DUNK” (released 2022), with ¥16.67 billion.
Released in 447 theaters nationwide (382 standard + 65 IMAX), the film is Chiikawa’s first movie, built around a long-form story called the “Siren Arc,” written especially for the film by original creator Nagano. It follows Chiikawa and friends as they receive an invitation to a “special island” and head off on an island training camp. This long-awaited adaptation brings to life one of the series’ most popular arcs — one that repeatedly trended on social media as it was serialized — with Chiikawa’s adventures depicted under Nagano’s full supervision.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Just watch it as a story and you'll be fine.
Momonga (the flying squirrel character) is annoying and irritating, but it works.
Just read the manga instead.
As the core demographic ages, these kinds of films will keep posting bigger numbers going forward —
whether they're actually good is a separate question.
It's an older survey, but Chiikawa isn't uniquely broad in age range compared to others.
https://manamina.valuesccg.com/articles/2873
The movie's probably good, but a movie theater isn't exactly proof a show is good, so it's going on my 'watch if it airs on TV' list.
The movie has a pretty different vibe from the mostly slice-of-life TV series —
if anything, it's a straight-up adventure story.
It's pulling in people of all ages, so it'll probably keep growing.
Re: #15
Why watch the anime at all? If you're curious about the story, you can just read the original manga.
I don't get people who say 'I got curious so I tried the anime' and go on about it —
the anime episodes only run about a minute each, completely different from the movie to begin with.
Doesn't seem like the repeat-viewing type either.
No way, this is absolutely getting massive repeat viewings lol
I'll grant that a lot of it is people chasing the bonus items (tokuten).
As a film alone, it wouldn't hit numbers like this without the bonuses — it's not quite that good.
If anything, it's because of the bonuses that it's done this well; without them it might've done a bit less.
Chiikawa runs on two pillars — story fans and merch popularity — so the bonus-item push hits hard.
Though finding a movie that ISN'T handing out bonus items these days is the hard part.
Bonus-item marketing used to be pretty much limited to small-release otaku anime,
but ever since Demon Slayer established a whole reselling culture during COVID,
huge wide releases like One Piece, Slam Dunk, and Gundam SEED handing out mountains of bonuses became the norm.
Meanwhile Evangelion and Jujutsu Kaisen only ran about 5 rounds of bonuses.
Even Demon Slayer's own Mugen Train only did 9 rounds, but it kept escalating — Infinity Castle ran 24 rounds,
and handed out more than double the copies, over 23 million total.
They put out an insane number of bonus items and even ran random-bonus draws 3 times.
When the all-time box office leader pulls stunts like this, it really trashes the value of the rankings.
Japan's best-selling artist…
though the Korean BTS movie flopped hard…
Wow, there are 11.33 million people out there paying movie ticket prices for Chiikawa lol
Well hello there, Mr. Cynical Naysayer! (reizen ojisan — 5ch slang for a smug, sneering cynic)
Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle Part 1 403.6
Spirited Away 316.8
Titanic 277.7
Frozen 255.0
Your Name 251.7
Princess Mononoke 214.6
Kokuho 209.0
ONE PIECE FILM RED 203.4
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone 203.0
Howl's Moving Castle 196.0
Bayside Shakedown 2: Rainbow Blockade 173.5
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 173.0
THE FIRST SLAM DUNK 166.7
Chiikawa: The Secret of Mermaid Island 165.2 ←
Avatar 159.0
Detective Conan: The Million-Dollar Pentagram 158.0
Zootopia 2 157.1
Ponyo 155.0
Suzume 149.4
(all figures in ¥100 million, i.e. 100 = ¥1 billion)
Guess that puts Chiikawa around the ¥21 billion line.
Your Name being on there is kind of odd.
Did that one also have some kind of bonus-item push driving admissions?
A symbol of how dumb the world's gotten.
Sorry about that.
Last year I scoffed at someone who said 'Chiikawa's gonna be huge next year!'
I was reading it and buying the merch, and I still feel kind of betrayed.
Oda's gonna lose it and start handing out One Piece Card Game cards like crazy at the next movie lol
You think Chiikawa just showed up this year?
It's already been popular for 5-6 years, there's no way it disappears in a few years.
If anything, it's on track to get its own theme park (Chiikawa Land) at this rate.
It's already a market worth hundreds of billions of yen, and unlike something an ad agency force-fed into popularity,
it's content that's kept organically going viral online for years — it's not disappearing that easily.
meanwhile Korean K-pop's momentum in film is… nowhere to be found.
But isn't it just a Sumikko Gurashi ripoff?
It's a ripoff of this →(´・ω・`)
content-wise too.
Never touched the franchise before but I'm curious.
Watching just the movie is fine, but there's an official YouTube video that explains the Chiikawa world in a few minutes —
watch that first and it's a lot easier to connect with the characters.
Background and Points of Debate
At the root of this bonus-item-marketing debate is the method established by 2020’s “Demon Slayer: Mugen Train” — distributing admission bonuses (nyujosha tokuten) in staggered waves to encourage repeat viewings. As the thread notes, that film ran 9 waves of bonuses, while “Infinity Castle” Part 1 alone ran 24 waves and reportedly distributed more than 23 million copies total — meanwhile films like Evangelion and Jujutsu Kaisen ran only around 5 waves, showing how much the scale of these campaigns varies by title. That variance makes comparing all-time box office rankings tricky, and it’s worth being cautious about judging films purely by revenue when stacking them against pre-bonus-era titles like “Spirited Away” or “Titanic.” The thread also saw comments like “people who used to mock it are doing a total 180 now,” reflecting how, even though Chiikawa has been a consistently buzzy topic online for years, opinion remains split on what’s really driving its popularity — the quality of the work itself, or the pull of the bonus items.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[Movie] ‘Chiikawa’ Box Office Tops ¥16.52 Billion, Climbs to 15th All-Time.”
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