"Oh-oku" so-so debut, so-so result for Hoga this year

Toei+Fuji TV's holiday season ace "Oh-Oku, The Women Of The Inner Palace" recorded 179,000 admissions and 238 million yen, not so bad but not so good result, compared to Yukie Nakama 's previous aesthetic ninja film "SHINOBI" (111%) and Toei's last year's holiday hit war movie "YAMATO" (70%).  Fuji recorded a huge hit with all-star comedy "Suite Dreams" last holiday season (final gross 6.1bil. yen), and they were hoping to do a repeat of another 5 billion with this one, but Eiga.com estimates the final gross to be 1.5-2 billion yen.

See Kogyo Tsushin for the complete ranking list.

In the meantime, "Love and Honor" reaches to 2 billion yen mark, keeping the No. 2 position among the holiday cinemas after "Letters from Iwo Jima",　which also surpassed 2 billion.   With all the other high-profile J-movies, "NANA2", "Inugami Clan" and "Oh-Oku" in disappointing results, the year of "J-movie resurgence" is capped with a bit gray cloud.

In a few Nihon Keizai Shinbun (the top business newspaper in Japan) columns which reflect on 2006 Japanese movie industry, the analysts all agree that 2006 was a good year for the J-movies overall,  but that there are some signs that the industry is going into the same dilemma as Hollywood - over-supply of films, loss of creativity due to the risk-averse production decisions, and small-scale productions crowded out by many mega-million budget films dominating the theaters. 

As I pointed out previously, all these big holiday hogas are somehow sequels and remakes.  I hope that these disappointing results are not the beginning of the end already.  I still believe that it is a good thing for J-movies to earn lots of money, as a theory.  It allows actors/actresses to concentrate on movies more, rather than averting their attention to CM and TV appearances to make their living.  I have a feeling that more good actors/actresses are doing more movies and less TVs lately - such as Joe Odagiri, Satoshi Tsumabuki and Miki Nakatani (although I only get that feeling from Net news/blogs and I don't have much access to Japanese TV's, so let me know if I am wrong).  The term "movie star" has been meaningless in Japan, where movie was a side business for the top actors, but finally some of them are becoming more "movie star" rather than "TV talent".  The money also attracts good talents to the movie making, and it allows the time and budget for all the preparation and deliberate post production, including CG's.  This year's J-movie success has changed moviegoers' general image of "hoga" to positive, and that leads them to look into the smaller production hogas as well.  The whole pie is expanding, in short.  So, I do hope that the holiday season glitch is just a seasonal problem.

Source:  Eiga.com, Movie Consultant Blog, Kogyo Tsushin, Nihon Keizai Shinbun

<Addition 12/29>

Check out the situation in Korea at Korean Pop Wars.  Very interesting, in light of what I wrote above.