The XXXHOLiC live-action movie directed by Mika Ninagawa debuted on the 5th place in Japan’s box office on it’s opening week. It took a while for the numbers to come in, due to the Golden Week holiday in Japan.

The movie grossed US$678,321 in its opening weekend (April 29th-May 1st) and US$1,450,436 after 9 days since its release.

April 29th – May 1st weekend (Gross/Total Gross)

1st – Detective Conan: The Bride of Halloween ($5,665,453 / $40,330,183)
2nd – Crayon Shin-chan: Mononoke Ninja Chinpuden ($2,191,837 / $6,726,318)
3rd – Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore ($2,166,432 / $26,088,958)
4th – Free! The Final Stroke Part 2 ($987,323 / $3,215,116)
5th – XXXHOLiC ($678,321 / $1,450,436)

The numbers are all in US dollars.

Source: Box Office Mojo.

I honestly expected a much better performance, I don’t know how much the pandemic caused an impact on it — probably not much considering how well the Detective Conan movie is doing. Also, I’ve been informed that the movie is not being screened in a lot of theaters, which could mean that the distribution is not as wide as the other movies in positions 1-4. If there are less screens showing the movie, you will end up having less grossing.

There are many ways to measure if a movie was successful, the most common of them being whether it profited enough to cover its productions costs. Unfortunately, at this point it is unknown how much was the production cost for the XXXHOLiC movie.

It’s also worthwhile checking XXXHOLiC‘s performance against the previous movies directed by Mika Ninagawa:

• Sakuran (2006) – debuted at #6 (First weekend gross: $370,831 / Total domestic gross: $5,973,534)
• Helter Skelter (2012) – debuted at #4 (First weekend gross: $2,937,152 / Total domestic gross: $24,231,554)
• Diner (2019) – debuted at #3 (First weekend gross: $1,756,882 / Total domestic gross: $9,673,094)
• No Longer Human – debuted at #4 (First weekend gross: $1,566,799 / Total domestic gross: $10,452,114)

Only Sakuran (2012) had a slightly worse performance than XXXHOLiC, but given that the numbers are from 2012, I honestly don’t know if they have been corrected to reflect inflation over the years (I don’t think so). Helter Skelter had a really good opening weekend, the best of all five Ninagawa movies, and the best total grossing as well.

There are two things to keep an eye out from now on: 1) how the XXXHOLiC movie goes in the next weekends (maybe it will have a timid, but long run); 2) Due to CLAMP’s international appeal, there is a possibility of having the XXXHOLiC movie opening in other countries, which would of course contribute to its total grossing. The same happened with Sakuran and Helter Skelter (both also manga adaptations).

Considering that at this point the movie is not getting distributed massively, one could say that it was a good first week performance. Let’s hope that it will open in more screens in the next weeks.