As schools entered the summer vacation and a 3 day holiday weekend (Umi no Hi weekend), Kimura Takuya’s HERO ranked first at the box office. TOHO gave it a very wide release at 443 screens and the movie dominated the box office, recording the most number of admissions for any live-action film on opening weekend for 2015. In addition, over the 3-day holiday weekend, it earned over 1,058,080,000 Yen, becoming the fastest live-action film this year to reach the 1 billion.

Pokemon XY: Hoopa and the Clash of Ages opened strong at no. 3 while Pixar’s Inside Out settle at 4th place.

Check out the latest ranking below.

Japan Box Office July 18 – 19
Rank	Last Week	Movie	Weeks
1	New	HERO	1
2	1	The Boy and The Beast	2
3	New	Pokemon XY: Hoopa and the Clash of Ages	1
4	New	Inside Out	1
5	2	Terminator: Genisys	2
6	3	Avengers: Age of Ultron	3
7	4	Love Live! The School Idol Movie	6
8	5	Shaun the Sheep Movie	3
9	6	Mad Max: Fury Road	5
10	8	Anpanman: Mija and the Magic Lamp	3

Eight years after the first film, Kimura Takuya’s HERO ranked first. Published in 443 screens, the movie mobilized 540,963 during opening weekend and earned 732, 77,900 Yen, becoming the number 1 live-action film in Japan for the year. However, this figure is 27.1 lower than the opening of the first film (815 billion Yen). Last July 18, FUJI TV aired a special program “HERO THE TV”, which recorded a viewing rate of 12.2%.

The Boy and The Beast retreated to second place grossing 500 million Yen and pulling an audience of 350,000. Maintaining strong, the movie alraedy topped 1.4 million admissions in 20 days and is closing in on 1.9 billion yen.

For new movies, popular animation movie Pokemon XY: Hoopa and the Clash of Ages ranked 3rd. Published in 364 screens, the movie mobilized 351,592 people and grossed 384,115,100 Yen. It is lower by 2.3% than last year’s film. The movie is expected to finish around 2 billion yen.

Pixar’s latest animated film Inside Out was published in 411 screens and mobilized 316,315 people, earning 406,025,100 Yen. It was not able to follow Disney’s “Cinderella” and “Tomorrowland” which opened at number 1 this year. Other animated movies “The Boy and The Beast” and “Pokemon” has divided the animated film audience. It looks forward to breaking 2.5 billion Yen total.

(via Eiga ranking)