By Mark Schilling
It was supposed to be an interesting match up -- the great Japanese box office champion, Hayao Miyazaki, against tough young challengers, Brad Bird and his Pixar animators. Miyazaki's old school 2-D animation against Pixar's wave-of-the-future 3-D. Would the veteran, now 63 and threatening retirement for years, be able to hold his own -- or would he fade in the middle rounds?
After the Christmas season -- and six weeks in the theatres for Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle and four weeks for Pixar's The Incredibles -- it's a knock out for the champ. Miyazaki's film not only still leads the Japanese box office, holding the number one spot for six weeks straight, but is well on its way to bettering the all-time mark set by his previous megahit, the 2001 Spirited Away. On January 2, 44 days after its release on November 20, Howl's recorded its 10th million admission, finishing the day with 10,106,284. This is nearly halfway to Spirited's total of 23,500,000.
By comparison, The Incredibles slipped to third on the nine-major-cities chart in its fourth week, on 32 screens, behind The Terminal, with nineteen, while its screen average, $35,401, was seventh in the top ten. This, given the holiday competition, is not shabby for a film four weeks into its run -- but The Incredibles will be hard put to equal Finding Nemo's Y11.0 billion ($106.8 million) -- the box office record for a Pixar film in Japan. Spirited Away's total of Y30.5 billion ($296 million) is beyond the moon.
Meanwhile, Tom Hanks, in the flesh, has proven to be formidable holiday draw. In its second week The Terminal dropped only 11.2 percentage points to a $90,892 screen average on the nine cities chart -- the highest in the top fifteen. Meanwhile, another Hank's starrer, The Polar Express, slid to a less impressive average of $18,079 in its fifth week, despite the hype devoted to its advanced performance capture technology. What's the moral? In Japan, at least, the old is still new.
