And this is the most important thing:Kazuya Mishima wrote: ↑Tue Jun 20, 2023 7:06 pmYou've got to bare in mind that the exchange rate was weaker when Super Hero came out when compared to Broly. So rather than it being 18.5M USD against 34.5 USD it was really 2.5B vs 4B JPY so closer to about two thirds of Broly.Super Saiyan Swagger wrote: ↑Fri Jun 16, 2023 9:52 am I understand that the delay would've had some kind of negative effect on the Japanese box office, but it made like almost half of what Broly made in Japan. Super Hero did 18.5M USD vs Broly's 34.5M USD. That's really bad.
The movie making way more money in the US than Japan is actually hilarious and embarassing. The film released in the US 2 months after Japan, got leaked online and still managed to make $38M USD.
The movie had no real hook in the marketing, that was the problem. Except for it being CG which the Japanese don't much care for... its selling point was just that it was more Dragon Ball.
I mean DBS: Broly was just more Dragon Ball, but it had several things going for it: namely that it was able to start its hype cycle during the anime's run, featured Goku and Vegeta heavily, rebooted the Broly movies which were astronomically popular, didn't have to deal with an ongoing pandemic.
Granted, Toei had always been upfront about Super Hero always being a "smaller" film compared to Broly, and I imagine that fact (as well as Covid) went into their estimates over how much they were going to make.