Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga has become the first overseas feature to open at the top of the Japanese box office in 2024 and surpassed the opening for 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.
Despite a soft opening and declining figures for the Warner Bros. action feature elsewhere in the world, Furiosa scored a strong start for an international film in Japan, where audiences are increasingly turning toward local productions.
The film took $2.05m (¥318m) during its three-day opening weekend in Japan, recording 199,163 admissions from May 31 to June 2.
This exceeded figures for the opening weekend of Mad Max: Fury Road in Japan, where it opened on June 20, 2015 and took $1.7m (¥265m) from 175,579 admissions.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a prequel and origin story of road warrior Furiosa, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, before she met Mad Max. Directed by George Miller, the film premiered at Cannes and opened below expectations with $25.6m in North America and a further $33.3m from 75 international markets. It was unseated from the worldwide top spot on its second weekend by Sony’s The Garfield Movie and is up to $116m to date.
Warner Bros. Japan cited the large number of release formats for Furiosa, including IMAX and 4D, as driving repeat viewers and becoming one factor in the success of the film’s opening weekend.
The studio has also announced a “cheer screening” of the film, in which viewers are invited to stand, cheer and quote dialogue, on June 13 in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
Japanese creatives such as acclaimed video game creator Hideo Kojima and manga artist Tetsuo Hara have long cited Miller’s Mad Max franchise as inspirations for their own works that include Metal Gear Solid and Fist of the North Star respectively.
At one point, Furiosa was being planned as a Japanese anime, with animator Mahiro Maeda contributing concept sketches. Some of Maeda’s concepts, such as the teddy bear worn by Chris Hemsworth’s character, were incorporated into the live-action film.
The success of the feature goes against an ongoing box office trend in Japan, which has been dominated by homegrown anime titles such as the latest in the Spy x Family, Doraemon and Haikyu!! franchises.
Last week, Detective Conan: The Million-Dollar Pentagram became the biggest film in the long-running Japanese anime franchise with takings of $89.6m (¥14.1bn), cementing its position as the most successful Japanese film of 2024 to date.
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