Legendary anime film director Makoto Shinkai is at it again. His last two films, Weathering With You and Your Name, both sit in the list of the top 10 highest-grossing anime films worldwide. Your Name is third, and Weathering With You is seventh. However, it certainly looks like that might change with his new film Suzume.
According to Crunchyroll, Suzume has seen the highest Japanese box office opening of any Makoto Shinkai film to date. Considering that Your Name is only roughly $120 million off being the highest-grossing anime film, Suzume might be the one that finally takes down the mighty Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train if it continues to perform this well. To put this into actual numbers, Crunchyroll reports that “Suzume made 114.7% of Weathering With You’s three-day opening box office gross.”
Suzume is outperforming even the recent Marvel release Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, as according to the press release, the film has made 1.88 billion yen (US$13.51 million) on the back of 1.08 million tickets sold. This is Makoto Shinkai’s seventh feature film-length movie.
MyAnimeList summarizes the plot of Suzume as:
Suzume, a 17-year-old girl who lives in a quiet town in Kyushu, encounters a traveling young man who tells her “I’m looking for a door.” She follows after him and discovers a weathered door in the ruins in the mountains as if it were the only thing left standing from a collapse. As if drawn by something, Suzume reaches for the door. Before long, doors begin to open one after another in various parts of Japan. As disasters come from the far side of the doors, the open doors must be closed. The stars, the setting sun, and the morning sky—in that place she wandered into, there was a sky that seemingly blended all of time together. Guided by the mysterious doors, Suzume’s “door-locking journey” begins.
Crunchyroll will be bringing the film to theaters outside of Asia sometime in 2023, and we can only hope it’s very early 2023.
