On Friday, even though it was still daytime, the people in charge of the major cinema chains could no longer withstand the pressure coming from the owners of their affiliated theaters. No matter how many cooperation agreements they had with the production side behind Mirage, they had no choice but to cut its screenings and increase the number of slots for 5 Centimeters per Second.
Sora had only appeared on a variety show once, on Wednesday, to promote the film. Yet with Noriko Animation quietly pushing things from behind the scenes, his appearance spread rapidly among Japanese movie fans.
Every film needed something that could anchor itself in the hearts of its audience.
For 5 Centimeters per Second, the main focus of its promotion had become "missed chances and regret." Its target audience was clear: the countless young people across Japan who had once lived through the end of a relationship.
Especially because of those two lines of poetry that matched the spirit of the work so well, simple yet filled with a quiet, lingering beauty.
Many viewers who planned to watch the film that day ended up buying tickets with their current partners precisely because they had been drawn in by the promotional lines circulating online. That was how their interest in the film had first begun.
Of course, publicity was only support.
In the end, everything still depended on the quality of the movie itself.
And on that point alone, Sora and everyone at Yume Animation had absolute confidence.
Although the film had already been in theaters for a full week, the number of viewers that day was even higher than it had been the previous Friday.
Before seven in the evening, the cinemas were already packed.
Inside the theater lobbies, there were groups of single men, women who had come together with friends, couples drawn in by the film's growing reputation and popularity over the past week, and even strangers who, despite not knowing one another at all, naturally gathered together and started chatting.
"So this movie is really that good?"
"It's been out for a week already. I checked online, and almost everyone is calling it a masterpiece. They just say the ending leaves you feeling awful. But whatever. If the movie is actually good, what does it matter if the ending is tragic? It's not like none of us have ever watched a tragedy before."
"I heard about it because of my teacher. During a classical literature class, when he was talking about love poems, he casually quoted those lines: 'If today we share the same falling snow, then in this life, we have grown old together.' He said that for someone young in this era to still write something with that level of sensitivity was impressive. I got curious, searched it up, and ended up finding 5 Centimeters per Second."
"Same here. A girl in my social circle had just broken up and posted an article with those two lines. Then, before I knew it, I was reading things about the movie."
"The main reason I came is because one of my best friends was completely wrecked after watching it. She called her ex and asked to get back together. And it actually worked. She said she couldn't be as detached as the heroine in the movie. I got curious, so I came to see it for myself."
"I've always liked anime, but the level of Japanese animated films over the past few years has been way too disappointing. On top of that, the TV anime this season are so bad that I went almost a month without paying attention to anything in the industry. I only found out 5 Centimeters per Second had already been in theaters for a week when it suddenly blew up these past few days. And somehow, its reputation is ridiculously high."
For a film to achieve strong box office numbers, financial backing and the quality of the film itself were equally important.
And in the market, that backing showed itself in two ways: the number of screenings and the effectiveness of the marketing.
In both respects, after Sora appeared on that variety show and stirred up a wave of attention, 5 Centimeters per Second had pulled far ahead of its competitors during this summer season.
Even late at night, there were still long lines of people waiting to enter screenings of the film.
And after those people walked out of the theaters, they would become the true nourishment that allowed the reputation of 5 Centimeters per Second to keep fermenting.
On Saturday, the eighth day of the film's release, an even larger wave of discussion than the one from its first week began spreading wildly across the internet.
A depressing masterpiece.
A film that made people question their entire lives after watching it.
Couples absolutely should not go see it together.
With the media helping push those messages forward, more and more Japanese moviegoers began paying attention.
Was it really that exaggerated?
But when Friday's box office numbers were released, every doubt vanished in an instant.
5 Centimeters per Second had earned 1.21 billion yen in a single day.
This was a film that had already been in theaters for a full week. Yet it could still reach that level of daily box office revenue.
That alone proved one thing: the film definitely had something special.
On Saturday, because Mirage had closed the previous day with only 670 million yen, theaters once again reduced its number of screenings and transferred part of them to 5 Centimeters per Second.
The cinema chains and theater owners across Japan did not care whether a film was supposedly a blockbuster led by famous stars.
For the entire previous week, they had already shown Mirage more than enough consideration. Even when all of its indicators were below those of 5 Centimeters per Second, they had still kept giving it a privileged screening schedule for seven full days.
That was already more than generous.
No matter how many benefits the distributor and producers promised, the condition for any behind-the-scenes arrangement to continue was simple: Mirage's box office performance could not be too pathetic. Otherwise, no theater owner would refuse real ticket revenue right in front of them just to chase some obscure under-the-table advantage.
And if, even after being supported like that, Mirage had still been overtaken on Thursday, then there was no prestige left to protect.
That weekend, the Japanese film market belonged entirely to 5 Centimeters per Second.
Sora spent the day rushing across several locations in the Tokyo metropolitan area, attending fan meetings organized at theaters, gathering the media, and seizing every possible opening to keep the film in the public eye.
Over the two days of the weekend, 5 Centimeters per Second earned 1.43 billion and 1.47 billion yen respectively.
At that point, before even completing two weeks in theaters, the film's total box office had already reached an astonishing 7.87 billion yen.
Meanwhile, Mirage, which almost everyone had once considered the likely king of the summer season before its release, had only reached 6.32 billion yen.
Its screening share had also fallen to 16%. As for the other two major live-action films, The Wind of Midsummer and Sprinter, their situation was even worse. Their total box office numbers stood at 2.78 billion and 3.21 billion yen, and both of their daily revenues had already dropped below ten million.
Before the summer season began, who could have predicted such a situation?
In just one week, an animated film had reversed everything and taken first place for the season.
It was true that Sora was already very well known in the TV anime industry and had considerable popularity.
But Japan had famous people in every field.
If support from TV anime viewers could be converted into cinema box office revenue so easily, then the Kantokus of popular television dramas would have become the pillars of the Japanese film industry long ago.
In reality, both in Sora's previous world and in this Japan, most so-called famous TV drama Kantokus who tried to move into film ended up failing so badly that even their own relatives could barely recognize them afterward.
That was why, before the release of 5 Centimeters per Second, almost no one in Japan had believed that Sora's debut in the film industry could achieve any meaningful result.
But 5 Centimeters per Second had simply exploded.
Because of the quality of the work.
Because of its word-of-mouth reputation.
And because of those promotional lines from Sora, which had suddenly begun circulating as if they had a life of their own.
Could it be...
Was this young man truly a genius?
It was not only people in the TV anime industry who had begun to see Sora that way. Even those in the Japanese film industry were now silently entertaining that thought.
It was obvious that 5 Centimeters per Second had seized the lead in the early competition of the summer season.
Over the next two weeks, the film would have no real competitor capable of challenging it. The entire movie market would, to some extent, become its box office territory.
Then a new week began.
Another workday.
The daily box office of 5 Centimeters per Second once again dropped into the thirty-million-yen range.
Then twenty-nine million.
Twenty-eight million.
But when the next weekend arrived, its box office rose once more.
On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the film closed with 65 million, 84 million, and 86 million yen respectively.
With that, before even completing three weeks in theaters, the total box office of 5 Centimeters per Second reached 11.3 billion yen.
After that, however, when another Monday came, its daily revenue fell to around ten million yen.
The film's audience potential had already been almost completely exhausted. In addition, new large-scale Japanese productions would begin releasing in the following weeks. Judging from market experience, by the time 5 Centimeters per Second left theaters, its final box office would likely remain within the range of 12.5 billion yen.
But that result was already more than enough to drive every employee at Yume Animation into a frenzy of excitement.
Even after Sora added another 300 million yen to the promotional budget, Yume Animation's total investment in 5 Centimeters per Second had only been 1.7 billion yen.
Besides, while box office revenue sharing was the main source of profit for a film, there were still other channels through which it could earn money.
Based on market experience, after deducting production costs, the net profit Sora would earn from 5 Centimeters per Second would be at least three billion yen, perhaps even more than 3.5 billion.
Those calculations were far too transparent.
After many people in Japan's television and film industries finished doing the math, envy nearly spilled from their eyes.
With Re:Zero, combining the first and second seasons, Sora would likely earn more than six billion yen in total revenue.
Now, 5 Centimeters per Second added another three billion or more.
In other words, in less than two years, this eighteen-year-old young man had pulled more than nine billion yen directly from Japan's audiovisual and animation industries.
For certain top-tier films or extremely popular long-running dramas, returns on that level were possible.
But which one of those works had not come from a major company, a massive team, and two or three years of investment?
And what had Sora started with?
An animation studio that had been on the verge of collapse three years earlier.
Naturally, the Japanese press had no intention of letting the matter cool down. In mid-August, reports about Sora began appearing everywhere, one after another.
Sitting in his office at Yume Animation, Sora read those articles with a faintly resigned expression.
"Now I'm truly famous."
"And is being famous a bad thing?" Yumi, who happened to be in his office, looked at Sora with a calm smile.
Although 5 Centimeters per Second had already been in theaters for a month and its daily box office had fallen to a few million yen, the profit from the work needed no explanation.
She might have only owned 7% of Yume Animation's shares.
But because of her, Noriko Animation, her family's company, had essentially become Sora's main partner for merchandise and film distribution.
The high box office of 5 Centimeters per Second alone was enough. As the party responsible for the film's promotion and distribution, Noriko Animation had earned at least more than one billion yen from it.
And since she had brought that project to her family's company, it was only natural that Yumi would receive her share as well.
She had grown up wealthy and had never cared that much about making money. But when someone could earn from both sides with little effort and almost no risk, who would be unhappy?
"When a tree rises above the forest, the wind is the first to tear it down. In terms of experience in this industry, I'm still nothing more than a newcomer, but I've made too much noise in both TV anime and film. These media outlets are clearly trying to lift me too high so they can watch me fall later. For an entire week now, they haven't stopped publishing stories about how much money I've made in the market. From now on, I'm definitely going to gain a lot of jealous enemies I don't even know."
Sora shook his head.
The Japanese market was truly enormous.
In the Japan of his previous life, works like Re:Zero and 5 Centimeters per Second could never have earned this much money.
But in this Japan, precisely because the market was so large, its ability to generate profit multiplied almost geometrically.
"When a tree rises above the forest, the wind is the first to tear it down..."
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