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The First Slam Dunk Film Earns US$625,000 in 1st 3 Days in N. America

The Box Office Mojo website is estimating a Friday-Sunday opening weekend earning of US$625,561 for The First Slam Dunk, the new anime film of Takehiko Inoue's Slam Dunk basketball manga, in North America. The Numbers website reported a marginally different US$625,611 earning for the film. Box Office Mojo lists that the film ranked at #12 in its first weekend.

GKIDS released the film in the United States and Canada with both an English dub and with Japanese audio and English subtitles last Friday.

The film opened in Japan on December 3, and ranked at #1 in its opening weekend. The film sold 847,000 tickets and earned 1,295,808,780 yen (about US$9.50 million) over its opening weekend. The film won Animation of the Year at the 46th annual Japan Academy Film Prizes. Toshiyuki Matsui, the film's producer, received this year's general award for Eiga Engeki Bunka Kyōkai's (Film Theater Culture Association) 42nd annual Fujimoto Awards.

As of July 23, the film had sold a cumulative total of 10.33 million tickets to earn 14,900,403,870 yen (about US$105.3 million). The film is now the 14th highest-earning film of all time in Japan, and is also now the eighth highest-earning anime film in Japan.

The film will end its run in Japanese theaters on August 31.

Inoue personally directed the film at Toei Animation and wrote the script. Among the listed staff members are character designer/animation director Yasuyuki Ebara (Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress) and technical directors Katsuhiko Kitada (Attack on Titan episodes, Major: Yūjō no Winning Shot), Naoki Miyahara (Digimon Adventure, Popin Q), Toshio Ōhashi (LayereD Stories 0), and Yū Kamatani (Looking for Magical DoReMi, Precure Super Stars!). Daiki Nakazawa directed the CG, and Yūta Ogura produced the CG. Kazuo Ogura directed the art. Yota Tsuruoka directed the sound with Koji Kasamatsu.

Sources: Box Office Mojo (link 2), The Numbers