One of my reasons to be excited about anime in this new year, Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle, opened in theaters in the United States this past weekend and while it didn’t do Demon Slayer: Infinity Train numbers, the money it pulled in on its opening weekend was more than respectable.
From Thursday to Sunday, the latest movie from Hosoda pulled in roughly $2 million at the box office, spread across 1,326 screens across the country. This was good enough to place it in fifth behind big-budget Hollywood films such as 5cream (Scream 5).
As has been noted on other outlets, this is a marked improvement from Hosoda’s previous outing, which only managed to pull in $800,000 at the stateside box office over the course of its entire run.
I’ve said this multiple times before, but I am pretty excited to watch this movie at some point this week. While I’m not overly experienced with Hosoda’s works, something about this movie has been drawing me in ever since I saw the first trailer.
For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with the developments of the Belle movie over the last year or so, anticipation for this one has been at a fever pitch. Hosoda himself referred to this movie as the movie that he’s always wanted to make and he’s only able to make this movie because of the “culmination of my past works.”
Hosoda has become a master director over the last couple of decades and to say that he’s “made it” is kind of an understatement at this point. While we’re likely never utter the name Hosoda in the same breath as say, Miyazaki, it wouldn’t be out of the question to say that he and Shinkai have elevated the anime movie game to never before seen heights and it is going to be absolutely amazing to see what they do to keep topping each other.
Source: Otaku USA
