From our other sites
The story
A thread introducing Japan’s domestic box office rankings went up on 5ch’s Nandemo Jikkyo G (“Everything Live”) board. The all-time #1 and #2 spots belong to “Demon Slayer: Mugen Train” (40.75 billion yen) and “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle Arc – Chapter One” (40.36 billion yen), reigniting discussion about how Japan’s box office has become dominated by anime films. Meanwhile, as a stand-in for the American side, posters brought up “Titanic” — a film now a quarter-century old — and from there the talk expanded into Hollywood’s recent slump and comparisons with the film industries of France, South Korea, and elsewhere. Some comments flatly declared “Japanese anime is more interesting than Hollywood,” while others pushed back with “you’re just running away into anime,” leaving opinions split.
What people said
*1 40.75 billion yen Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (2020)
*2 40.36 billion yen Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle Arc – Chapter One (2025)
Maybe it's because I watched Titanic long after its theatrical run, but I never really got what was so great about it
I mean, it's fine, it's entertaining, but was it really THAT good to become such a massive hit?
Was there some kind of disaster-movie boom going on back then or something?
Back then that was genuinely groundbreaking CG, you know
All those "-Man" superhero movies are boring, honestly
Top Gun's basically a comic book movie too
It's just a Tom Cruise idol vehicle
Go watch What's Eating Gilbert Grape
One Battle After Another
That one was straight-up boring
Used to be great, but now it's wall-to-wall superhero comic stuff, total snoozefest
Back then you could just enjoy watching Schwarzenegger give it his all, you know?
Come on, make good movies like that again
Makes me furious that Paul Verhoeven's new film can't get funding
Apparently it's a suspense movie about a conservative Christian woman clawing her way up through sex
It played out like a condensed NHK morning drama
No wonder it's a hit
Honestly, when that direct heir character collapsed from diabetes
I burst out laughing like "seriously, is this a morning drama?"
Then I laughed even harder at the "struggling through illness" scene right after
No offense meant by it
Kokuho was basically a greatest-hits reel of cheesy Showa-era Daiei melodrama
Genuinely corny through and through
It's the same cheap trick as those "24-Hour TV" specials making a kid who can't walk climb a mountain (Japan's famous tear-jerking charity telethon)
How did nobody crack up watching that kind of cheesiness play out on a kabuki stage
Though I do like the film's overall direction
Hollywood really isn't fun anymore
Actors, male and female alike, have lost all individuality
That's just you losing touch with the real world and running off to anime
lol
For some reason there's a whole demographic of old folks who went to see Demon Slayer in theaters thinking it was a period drama
Number 2 is also Demon Slayer, you know
All they've got to watch is Japanese anime or American sci-fi
French cinema is in pretty rough shape these days
Britain's still okay, I guess
but France is just unbelievably boring now
The most popular thing worldwide is Korean dramas, as always
Because it's the story everyone learned from the New Horizon English textbook (a standard Japanese junior-high English textbook)
Just think of it as a bad-end love story where both of them die
Background and Discussion Points
The fact that the “Demon Slayer” franchise holds Japan’s all-time #1 and #2 box office spots is based on publicly disclosed figures, confirming that theatrical anime films have been driving Japan’s movie market in recent years. That said, the latter part of the thread’s sense that “Hollywood movies have gotten less interesting than they used to be” comes down largely to individual taste, and isn’t something backed up by concrete box office data or rating metrics — worth keeping in mind. As for Korean cinema, some posters claimed “the number of releases has dropped sharply”; while a shift toward streaming-oriented productions is indeed a trend often pointed out in recent years, a decline in theatrical release counts doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as an overall drop in box office revenue. Comparing film cultures across countries tends to turn into a subjective debate, and within the thread itself, views that “anime is simply more interesting” existed side by side with rebuttals calling it “just running away into anime.”
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Americans: ‘Japan’s box office rankings are nothing but anime, lololol’ (a pun where the repeated laughing “草” spells out TV host Kusano Hitoshi’s name) wwwwww — Meanwhile, here’s what America’s ranking looks like“.
Leave a Reply