'Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection F' Blasts the US Box-Office

Despite having a somewhat limited release, the latest Dragon Ball Z movie, Resurrection  F is doing amazingly well at the box-office in North America. How well? Enough to break not only into the box-office top 10, but in the top 10 anime films ever released in the US. Opening on Tuesday, the film has played on a fraction of the screens that wide-releases could hope for. Despite that though, it earned over $5m and peaked at the number 5 spot in the box-office overall for the day (on Wednesday). It also had the best per-screen average of any film in the chart.

The film quickly out-grossed it's predecessor Battle Of Gods (which had a similar limited release) but then even went to beat out Miyazaki's The Wind Rises- a film which had the backing of Disney, an Oscar nomination and a much longer run to build it's total. DBZRF has now stormed into the top 10 grossing anime releases in the US, taking the 9th position. This is the first film not released by a major studio to make the list- the rest of the chart is made up of Pokemon, Ghibli and Yu-Gi-Oh movies. Due to this massive success, a number of cinemas have added encore screening on Monday. The limited event will come to a close on Wednesday, when it will continue to play in 367 cinemas.


This achievement is all the more impressive considering that Funimation (who released the film stateside) do not have the budget to advertise on the scale of the major studios, So this success is on the back of some limited advertising that was well targeted (such as on Toonami) and through word-of-mouth and social media. It seems that there's still a whole lot of love for Dragon Ball Z out there!

[source]