The third Yo-Kai Watch movie beat out Star Wars at the Japanese box office

Nyan

Yo-Kai Watch may have lost some steam in that it had a roughly 43% dropoff from the last film, but it still sold gangbusters at the box office over in Japan. that the third Yo-Kai film sold roughly 608,033,100 yen worth of tickets ($5.189 million USD) over its weekend debut, beating out the opening of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in that region. While Rogue One made more revenue due to more expensive admission fees, Japanese box office ranks are determined by tickets sold, which Yo-Kai won out with.

For reference, the second Yo-Kai Watch film (which also beat The Force Awakens last year in Japan) would eventually go on to make $47 million USD, which handily beats out the revenue of the last Pokemon film that ended up settling on $20 million. The series is still a big money maker over in Japan in theaters, but here, we ended🌱 up getting the first movie on TV for free just for the ext🐻ra publicity.

While the jury is out on whether or not Level-5 can still push people in the west into liking something so intrinsically Japanese, I’m just enjoying the ride.

[Eiga via ]