I am currently on a flight with like 3 hours left (luckily ended up with an airline that gives free WiFi) so here’s a quick update on the movie situation. Not on the movie’s content itself because I don’t feel confident going into full detail about it without having seen it, though maybe after my trip is over there’ll be enough context floating around to do a good enough post on story spoilers. So this is more about the reception/PR stuff going on: It is bad. Really bad.
The first weekend box office was seemingly not terrible, with a revenue of roughly 150 million yen and about 102,000 attendees. That actually makes it the second-highest grossing opening weekend in the series behind Movie 3. But the review scores are miserable. 1-2 stars everywhere, and as I predicted, turnout is pretty low for week 2 (granted they haven’t started distributing the second round of bonuses yet, so when those come out there might be a few repeat goers). Could be the IP isn’t as popular as they thought, could be it would’ve done better but that word of mouth is really hurting it. I think whether or not it breaks even is really up in the air depending on how much production/advertising costs and if all the merch sales go back into that (I don’t know how much profit is taken by theaters). Especially because they opened it in 350 theaters which seems to have been quite an overestimation.
Despite basically all the word of mouth being overwhelmingly negative (not that there weren’t some positive opinions but the negative voices are the most prominent) they were still planning to hold a post-launch stage greeting tomorrow. Well…not anymore.
The stage greeting, which was set to feature Watanabe, Kozakura, Keigo Sato from JO1 (one of the celebrity guest voice actors), and Fukuda was mysteriously canceled last minute. The official account only cited “various circumstances” but after monitoring social media since the movie’s release, it seems pretty obvious to me and many other people what the reason is: Fukuda was receiving death threats.
I wish I was joking but no, Twitter search and Fukuda’s mentions are full of people hounding him even though (or perhaps because) he’s been trying to avoid mentioning Keroro altogether and is talking about the Sakamoto Days movie again instead. “People online just say stuff because they’re anonymous but won’t actually do anything in person,” you might think, but Japan has to take this stuff very seriously after cases like the Kyoto Animation arson, which was also done by an otaku with a personal vendetta. The screening actually did sell out (probably more because of Keigo Sato than anything else but still) so it wasn’t lack of participation that got it canceled. They almost certainly didn’t have a choice but to avoid taking the risk for the safety of the staff and cast that would be in attendance.
It doesn’t help that around the same time, one of Fukuda’s favorite actors and one who had a cameo role in the Keroro movie, Jiro Sato, has had sexual harassment allegations come out against him. I’m leaning toward this being a coincidence due to the close timing of everything and it’s not like he was going to be at the event, but it definitely would’ve put Fukuda in an even more awkward spot if he were to appear at this screening since Jiro Sato is part of the “Fukuda squad” of recurring staff/actors in Fukuda’s movies and who knows whether anyone in that group knew about this and was covering things up or not. (The actress coming forward with the allegations was his co-star on a very recent TV drama with ongoing filming that does not involve Fukuda to my knowledge.)
Overall, regardless of how good or bad the actual movie is (I know what the problems are but I truly have a hard time believing it’s that irredeemable especially because a couple of the older movies weren’t good either but everyone is too nostalgia-brained to admit it), this is a truly heartbreaking situation for everyone involved especially after how long we’ve been waiting for the anniversary project to come to fruition and it’s extra sad that this is supposed to be the sendoff to the original cast. It’s really appalling to see people threaten a real human being’s life because they didn’t like his 10 minutes of cutaway gags in a cartoon frog movie. On the other hand, I am disappointed to hear about Jiro Sato’s sexual harassment case. I am naturally inclined to believe Ai Hashimoto in this case but the details are still emerging since Sato’s side is trying to put out a defense as well. If the allegations end up being true, it would be wrong of Fukuda to continue working with Sato. That’d be much more offensive to me than the Keroro movie being mediocre. Misogyny is pretty rampant in the Japanese entertainment industry so I have my doubts but I hope for the best.
I am starting to worry about how this reflects on Keroro’s other anniversary projects later this year and the home release of the movie, but I’ll try not to jump to conclusions yet. This is unfortunately probably going to be a big stain on the franchise for the rest of its existence regardless of what comes next, so let’s just hope they find a way to turn things around somehow.
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