That's much better than how it was looking from Friday numbers.

I forget that not releasing in TOHO will have impact on our usual ratio.

Guessing Friday was 6M approx. Sat was 20M and Sunday may be 30M.

I hope it can leg to 1B as WOM is quite okay elsewhere, don't think there will be much competition. Ralph 2 had 12x legs iirc, this has much smaller start, so may be goes bit crazy there with multiple.

Raya will come in above the forecast, though it'll still be Disney's worst opener on record for an animated film, and not come close to debuting inside the top 5 over the weekend.

And that's not due to COVID. Most other films have performed normally, and many have even outperformed their predecessors or similar films.

There's no silver lining to opening with 40-50 million (below $500,000). The market is largely normal, and has been for over half a year now. This horrendous start is on Disney for applying their same-day Disney+ strategy where it isn't needed. I get this in the U.S. and most other markets that struggled big with COVID, but not here. It likely caused Toho and Movix to scrap it in retaliation.

I think Raya didn't had that buzz in first place so starts everywhere bad. WOM is quite okay though.

The seating of DS is considerably cut, with only 40,000 seats left.
40 billion Yen is now in question, I think

I don't think so. It's not like it's selling anywhere near its current capacity. On the weekdays, it's actually been less than 10% occupancy on average recently (based on the usual locations). I can see why they are reducing the excess number of seats.

So the seating for Evangelion 3.0+1.0 have been assigned.
That means the film won't be delayed, hopefully....

and yes, 40,000 seats for Demon Slayer is not great, but still could be enough.
Besides, in coming holidays they can just re-assign more seats

40k for both weekdays and weekend? For weekend, I think it needs more than that because this weekend, the admits are around 30k-35k .......

Corpse,
in terms of heavy cut of seats for DS,
how do you see it ?

However, the loss of all the 4d-imax screens will also lower the average prices of DS...

How much do you think Evangelion will collect in the first weekend? Considering that there was no news of broken ticket sales sites like in the case of Kimetsu, I don’t think that will repeat the success, but the fees themselves should be very good.

They went all in with Evangelion tomorrow! I think it cracked the top 5 widest releases ever. I'll have that chart up later today. There's been so many delays over the last 9/10 years, it'll be fun to watch how it performs. I don't believe, outside of very small limited releases, that a major film has opened on a Monday. And it's a regular ol' weekday Monday at that, not during a holiday week or anything.

Regarding the seating for Demon Slayer and the other films, I'd expect them to go up slightly closer to and over the weekend. Demon Slayer looks particularly harsh since it lost its 4dx showings.

A lot depends on how Evangelion does through the week a d weekend regarding the seating for everything else.

I'm on a small weekend trip right now, so I'll share more later tonight.

It did sell about 100K tickets(31% of the total) at Toho theaters after 48 hours from opening booking so Monday should be huge but EVA is probably fan driven unlike Kimetsu and will drop from there

Widest Releases (Seating) Since 2015 (~70% of the Market):

Seating, [Theaters/Showings]
1,336,504, [267/6,170] - Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (Oct., 2020)
1,085,077, [267/3,786] - Frozen 2 (Nov., 2019)
919,956, [258/3,250] - Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (Nov., 2018)
816,498, [251/3,196] - Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (July, 2018)
790.550, [257/3.511] - Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon A Time (Mar., 2021)
775,754, [262/2,657] - Toy Story 4 (July, 2019)
766,440, [241/2,556] - Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Nov., 2016)
728,306, [267/2,690] - Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (Dec., 2019)
725,315, [258/2,202] - Detective Conan: The Fist of Blue Sapphire (Apr., 2019)
719,848, [261/2,370] - Weathering With You (July, 2019)
719,670, [261/2,374] - Aladdin (June, 2019)
714,702, [236/2,789] - Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Dec., 2015)
701,865, [247/2,864] - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (July, 2017)
670,255, [254/2,527] - Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Dec., 2017)
668,663, [236/2,346] - Finding Dory (July, 2016)
667,610, [245/2,327] - Beauty and the Beast (Apr., 2017)
658,842, [231/2,256] - One Piece Film Gold (July, 2016)
655,976, [249/1,832] - Detective Conan: Zero the Enforcer (Apr., 2018)
648,401, [259/2,096] - Godzilla: King of the Monsters (June, 2019)
648,160, [252/2,037] - Dragon Ball Super: Broly (Dec., 2018)
608,132, [250/1,979] - Code Blue (July, 2018)
605,267, [239/1,676] - Detective Conan: Crimson Love Letter (Apr., 2017)
585,196, [254/1,787] - One Piece: Stampede (Aug., 2019)
547,894, [252/1,655] - Doraemon: Nobita's Chronicle of Moon Exploration (Mar., 2019)
533,783, [258/2,293] - Avengers: Endgame (Apr., 2019)
530,905, [230/1,502] - Detective Conan: The Darkest Nightmare (Apr., 2016)
530,456, [231/1,727] - Yo-Kai Watch: Great King Enma and the 5 Stories, Nyan! (Dec., 2015)
520,369, [237/1,744] - Jurassic World (Aug., 2015)
517,134, [260/1,835] - Spider-Man: Far From Home (June, 2019)
515,406, [233/1,460] - Doraemon: Nobita and the Birth of Japan (Mar., 2016)
501,322, [240/1,487] - Doraemon: Nobita's Great Adventure in the Antarctic (Mar., 2017)

Pretty remarkable. And this is a Monday opener, remember. A non-holiday Monday opener.

It has been almost 10 years since the last film, following numerous delays of various kinds, so I have to imagine that the fans (and there are many) are going to come out big despite it being a normal school/work day and with Tokyo and neighboring prefectures still closing by 8pm.

This final film is also over 2.5 hours long, which make things even more interesting. Many theaters are opening at 7am today to account for the long running time and having to show the film before 5pm (so that it finishes before 8pm). And the busiest locations, such as Toho Cinemas Shinjuku, is almost booked for the entire day (including the 7am showings).

This is traditionally a frontloaded franchise, so it'll be interesting to see how much demand it burns off in its first 5 days of release before its opening weekend. Especially since the first 3 million moviegoers are receiving an exclusive giveaway item.

Various photos taken from 7am-8:30am this morning for the first showings.

And remember... this is a non-holiday Monday opening day. And it was only rescheduled just over a week ago.

So cool to see lines for theaters. I wish US can take note from this.

Really huge. What can we expect for this movie today ? $10M ?

A $10 million day would require over ¥1 billion, and I don't think that's reasonable despite how big its first day is going to be. Japan isn't really a market for big first days like that due to capacity.

I'm expecting a monstrous ¥800 million ($7.5-8 million) first day. Excluding Demon Slayer (which holds 11 of the biggest 20 single-days ever, including the biggest top 8), it could be among the top 5 I believe.

Demon Slayer is the only film in history to ever have had a single-day come in over ¥1 billion (and it managed to have eight of them), and nothing can be compared to it, past, present, or future, since it's in a league of its own many times over. No one has compared Evangelion to Demon Slayer yet, but just in case they do and for any other film in the future, exclude Demon Slayer from any comparisons since nothing will come close to it in our lifetimes.

This is an early example of how "boring" everything will be forever now despite achieving massive starts of their own. Thanks to Demon Slayer, it's going to be nearly impossible for anything in the future to simply crack any sort of Top 5/10 lists and such since it holds so many of the top positions on so many different lists, let alone try to aim for a new record on any of them. For example, biggest 9th (NINTH) single-day is as high as anything can achieve now because beating any of Demon Slayer's top 8 days on that list is nigh impossible.

¥800 million opening day would be huge!
last year no film even achieved an opening weekend that big.

Apart from Demon Slayer, of course....

We should create a list without DS then to make things interesting

As of 5 pm it's doing about half of DS's first Saturday...on a Monday.

Not even a DEMON SLAYER sequel?

Impressive how popular the evangelion franchise still is. I don't think it'll crack 800M though.

as we do in India, non-Baahubali records.