Yo-kai Watch’s third movie, titled Sora Tobu Kujira to Double no Daiboken da Nyan! (The Flying Whale and the Grand Adventure of Double Worlds, Meow!) premiered in Japan, and it topped the Japanese opening weekend box office, beating out Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. [Thanks, ANN.]
The latest big screen adventure of Jibanyan and friends sold 545,211 tickets for 608,033,110 yen (about US$5.189 million) on Saturday to Sunday across 415 screens in Japan.
While that was only 57.5% of the opening weekend box office for the previous Yo-kai Watch movie that eventually earned 5.53 billion yen (about US$47 million) it was more than enough to top Rogue One: A Star Wars Story that sold 413,600 tickets for 653 million yen (roughly US$5.573 million) across 368 screens in Japan from Saturday to Sunday, which was about 52.5% of the opening weekend box office of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
This isn’t the first time that a Yo-kai Watch movie won the a duel against tie sci-fi giant in the Japanese box office, as the previous Yo-kai Watch film also beat Star Wars: The Force Awakens last year.
Eiga.com projects that the film will earn over 4 billion yen (about US$34 million).
