Hollywood once ruled over the Japanese box office. In 1975, the smash success of “Jaws” gave non-Japanese films their first majority share of the Japanese market: 55.6%. And as more effects-driven films by directors such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, and more actioners featuring muscular superstars like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger filled local theaters, Hollywood’s dominance grew.
The peak came in 2002, when “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” topped the year’s box-office rankings and the foreign film market share hit a record 72.9%, according to figures compiled by the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (Eiren).
When I began reporting on the Japanese film industry in the early 1990s, industry insiders told me that, with its massive financial and technical resources, and large roster of international stars, Hollywood was pretty much unbeatable at the domestic box office — and probably would be indefinitely. Rather than go head-to-head with this entertainment behemoth, Japanese producers played the demographic margins where local films were still strong: animation for the kids and samurai epics for the old folks.
But in the mid-2000s, veteran box-office analyst Hiroo Otaka began to notice a once-unthinkable trend: Hollywood movies were falling out of favor with Japanese audiences, including the young core fans who had once disdained local fare as hopelessly uncool. Confirmation came with Eiren figures for 2006: Domestic films grabbed a 53.2% market share, the first majority since 1985.
In his regular monthly column for Kinema Junpo, Japan’s oldest film magazine, Otaka tracked this trend closely from 2006 till today. And though his recently published collection of columns covers a range of topics over the past 23 years, its title is “Amerika Eiga ni Ashita wa Aru Ka?” (“Do American Movies Have a Future?”)
“The numbers are now the reverse of what we saw in 2002,” Otaka tells me while sitting in a basement coffee shop in Tokyo’s Yurakucho neighborhood. “Last year, the share of foreign films was about 31%.”
Otaka believes various factors have brought about this reversal of fortunes — one being the decline of Walt Disney Studios in the Japanese market. Disney’s live-action and animated films once contended for the box-office crown year after year.
“For about 10 years, until the start of the pandemic, American films were basically supported by Disney,” Otaka says.
But the pandemic shut down distribution of nearly all Hollywood films, including Disney’s.
“As a result, the Japanese audience for Disney films, which had been quite large, gradually started to fade away,” Otaka says. That is, they kicked the Disney habit, and have been slow to take it up again.
Changes in distribution patterns contributed to this drop-off: Hollywood studios used to roll out films with relatively long “windows” for each media platform. Fans would have to wait months or years for films to move from theaters to home media and then TV broadcast. These windows, Otaka notes, have been drastically abbreviated or abandoned altogether as films go straight to streaming.
“Disney has been a leader in shortening the theatrical window,” he says. “You don’t have to wait long for their films to be on Disney+.”
Even so, many Japanese fans still want the theatrical experience. A recent example is “Top Gun: Maverick,” which earned a resounding ¥13.57 billion at the Japanese box office in 2022.
“Tom Cruise made it for the big screen,” Otaka says, “and that’s how people wanted to see it.”
Meanwhile, animated Japanese films have been climbing to new box-office heights, with recent feature-length installments of the venerable “One Piece” and “Detective Conan” series seeing record figures for their franchises. Also reaching the ¥10 billion box-office milestone recently are “The First Slam Dunk,” an animation based on the mega-hit basketball manga by Takehiko Inoue, and “Suzume,” the latest film by anime maestro Makoto Shinkai.
“The audiences for these films are mainly anime fans,” Otaka says. “They are not moviegoers who switched from Hollywood films to Japanese films.”
Nonetheless the result is the same: the end of Hollywood’s dominance in Japan.
Including “The First Slam Dunk,” which opened in December, four of the top five highest-earning films so far this year have been animated. The only entry from Hollywood, in the third spot, is “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” a computer-animated film based on the iconic Nintendo game series. The only Hollywood live-action film in the top 10 is “Fast X,” the latest installment in the “Fast & Furious” action series.
Another factor in Hollywood’s decline, according to Otaka, is the lack of major stars known to even occasional moviegoers: “Japanese fans used to go to the theater to see a certain star, but with the ‘Avengers’ series, who are the actors? You don’t know.”
One exception to this trend is the aforementioned Cruise (“He’s been a symbol of America here for more than 20 years since the first ‘Mission: Impossible’ movie”). In today’s Hollywood, however, a star with Cruise’s sort of worldwide popularity has become increasingly rare.
“It’s a bit sad, isn’t it? A true ‘star’ was someone who transcended culture and language,” Otaka says. “As the impact of Hollywood stars diminishes, the interest Japanese people have in seeing Hollywood movies decreases.”
By contrast, TV networks in Japan churn out films headlined by local talent — fare usually based on a hit manga, novel or other property that’s familiar to local audiences.
“These films have high name recognition,” Otaka says. “Also, TV networks heavily promote their films on their own media platforms, so they are strong in the Japanese market.
“Whether they are accepted abroad is another matter.”
Otaka posits one final theory as to why Hollywood’s popularity is fading among the fandom here: Japanese audiences are simply less interested in America.
“Japanese people often visited the United States because of their admiration for Americans. In the 1960s and ’70s, American people lived on a completely different level from Japanese.”
However, he adds that as Japanese living standards rose, the gap shrank.
“Now, young people are not so interested in the U.S.,” he says. “And they call the people who like Hollywood movies ‘otaku’ (nerds). Who could have seen that coming?”
Hiroo Otaka’s new book is “Amerika Eiga ni Ashita wa Aru Ka,” and it is released via Harmonica Books.
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