Anime Movies: The Silvery Rebirth of Profitibility

by omo

Saturday, April 10, 2010 at 06:54 AM EDT

The OVA format (or OAV as I preferred it...same thing) was a format in which anime took shape and lived one of its most vibrant period of its ever-extending history. A lot of today's older, well-spoken fans look back to those times fondly. I don't blame them, as I too have some time-endured favorites from the 80s and 90s where such well-loved stories were only available on a direct-to-video mode of sale.

There are a lot of reasons why that was the case. But at the same time, there are a lot of reasons why it isn't the case any more. Is it fair to attribute the myriad of reasons and factors that took the direct-to-video mode of sales largely on the rise of the late-night TV anime segment and the new world order of the internet video? Perhaps in another post.

While we can wax nostalgia about what happened 10+ years ago, maybe it's time to look at how something similar could be happening today right under our noses: The anime movie revival.

In the past 3-4 years, there have been some major flagship titles hitting the silver screen. It's sort of interesting to see how it is all developing, because what separates, say, Rebuild of Evangelion from the next annual Doreamon feature, is what is key.

One key feature, for example, is how Ghibli is screening for large numbers. You'll not going to see the numbers Princess Mononoke pulled with a Lupin remake. You might see the sort of number a recent Pokemon feature pulls along with an Evangelion remake, but probably not at the profit-per-screening numbers the Eva films pulled.

It's a bit of sifting the right signal from a sea of noise, because animated feature films have been with us since the beginning. Otaku anime gets cinematic features since the very early days (which is why I have copies of the Akihabara Dennou Gumi movie amirite). So let's do some number hopping. The Yamato series is probably a good start. The 1978 Yamato film broke box office history, but once we take into account of inflation/deflation it still isn't too far off than Eva 2.0's gross in Japan. Eva 2.0 is a good modern landmark, which points to a return-to-profitability in this format, so let's dig a bit deeper.

Check out where Eva 2.0's opening weekend numbers are at our favorite band of Canned Dogs. Now there are a few different numbers per each film there, but the key numbers are # of screens, and gross, and of course, gross per screen. A movie loses money when it screens at a lot of theaters but nobody comes to watch it; on the other hand a movie that screens only in a handful of theaters but sells out every time are at some kind of "max" in terms of hitting the ceiling of how much money they could make by investing as little as possible in making the film as widely available as they could. When a film maxes out like that, it is probably not at the optimal value to maximize gross profit in which if more screenings were added. By adding more screenings and theaters, the same film would still sell very well on a per-screen basis, and end up drawing more viewers for a higher gross. Having more screenings (ie., more reels or whatever) involves higher risk, of course.

[I should talk about how much it cost to make a movie versus how much it cost to get it screened. But I can't... Let's just say that anime on the silver screen is a factor more than anime on TV, which is, as we know, not a lot. And this factor is not a particularly large one. You can deduce this by understanding that there are anime movies in which screening is done in the single digits. For some numbers, this is as good as any. Maybe some film buffs can fill us in.]

Looking at One Piece Strong World, we see it screened at 188 theaters on opening weekend and made over a billion yen(!), compared to Eva 2.0's 120 screens and about half as much gross, but yet it still raked in 4.27 million yen per screen. Scroll down and we see UP, which screened at a whopping 653 theaters but only made out about 628 million yen, for 0.96 million yen per screen; that's less than 1/4 as efficient. Well UP is a foreign film so it's an apples-to-mikan sort of measurement. Japan's domestic equivalent, perhaps, are the likes of Pokemon Arceus. Well, it may be a misstatement, as I'm sure Pokemon Arctus is more profitable than UP in Japan.

Pokemon Arceus screened at 366 screens on opening weekend and made about 983 million yen, so it's about twice the gross with three time as many screens than Eva 2.0--or 2.69 million yen per screen. I highlighted this particular film because 366 screens are impressive enough to penetrate most of Japan, as other domestic staples have similar opening day screenings. For example, the Doreamon 2009 movie had 364 screens at 1.02 million yen grossed per screen on opening weekend. That also would be considered not-a-hit, or similar to UP. For a flop, we can look at the Professor Layton film. Thanks to the Nana-tards, at least it raked in 0.29 million yen per screen, for a total of 311 screens in its opening weekend. Even the Eureka 7 50%-clip-show did a respectable 1.75 million yen per screen across just six screens.

That is like a drop in the bucket compared to a certified monster like Ponyo--opening weekend, 927 screens, 3.3 billion gross, or roughly 3.56 million yen per screen. Wait, it's less than Eva 2.0? (...and Haruhi?) In the world of Japanese animated films, there are two worlds, too. Or three.

And there lies the rub. The cinema for the otaku-oriented is small, but profitable. The margin is high, even if one would question the distributors' ability to scale up these high bang-per-buck results across more theaters for a better gross result. I don't know the business back end of these films so I can't say, but for the animation production, that's some fat margins in which you don't necessarily have to mess with a TV company to obtain. It's also much more resistant to internet piracy and that sort of thing than a TV broadcast. Plus, you can still turn around and sell these movies as home videos, unlike OAVs.

I wonder how well the Kara no Kyoukai films did. And also the barrage of Madhouse films from 2009-2010. In the past 9 months I think Madhouse released at least 3 full-length animated features. Yes everyone knows Summer Wars (1 million yen/screen opening weekend btw), but there's also that penguin film, and Mai Mai Miracle (best of the lot IMO). Redline (it's a now a 90-minute film) is about to come out this year (and it has already screened in a film fest as of this writing). Is Madhouse onto it? How about the usual suspects that hit theaters earlier this year: Haruhi movie, UBW, and Nanoha? And that's besides the usual TV-series-turn-film suspects like the two Eden of the East films and the two Macross Frontier fims?

When will a Shaft work hit the silver screen? LOL.

PS. Peruse the ja.wikipedia article on this stuff.

PPS. I totally wrote this before ANNCast this week came out. There's a blurb at around the 18:55 mark which briefly touches on this. I think they're very wrong about the "hardcore otaku anime" thing though...considering what is already out there. Anyways, we're all copping from here.

This article originally appeared on Omonomono.