Kabuki drama Kokuho has become Japan’s highest-grossing domestic live-action film, ending a 22-year reign at the top of the charts and underscoring the commercial strength of locally produced, adult-oriented cinema. Distributor Toho says the film has earned about 17.38 billion yen (around $111 million) in Japan, edging past the 17.35 billion yen record set by police comedy Bayside Shakedown 2 in 2003.
Directed by Lee Sang-il and adapted from Shuichi Yoshida’s novel, Kokuho follows a boy born into a yakuza clan who is taken in by a prestigious kabuki family and rises to become a revered onnagata actor over five decades. The 175-minute feature premiered at Cannes and opened in Japanese cinemas on June 6; by late November it had drawn more than 12.3 million admissions, roughly one in ten people in Japan. The film has been selected as Japan’s submission for the next Academy Awards in the international feature category and is slated for a wider North American release in 2026.
Its success has spilled beyond the multiplex. Shochiku, which operates Tokyo’s Kabukiza Theatre, reports about 10,000 people seeing kabuki for the first time between July and October, with new audiences rising close to 30 percent year on year. The film’s emphasis on full-length, undubbed stage performances and backstage routines has been praised by theatre specialists, and the source novel has sold over two million copies as interest in the story’s world has grown. Fans have also begun visiting filming locations, turning the movie into a modest tourism driver.
Kokuho still sits behind anime juggernauts such as the Demon Slayer films and Spirited Away in the all-time Japanese box-office rankings, but it now holds the domestic live-action record and ranks among the country’s ten highest-grossing releases. The performance is striking for a standalone period drama without franchise branding in a market where animated properties dominate.
Outside Japan, the response has been more muted. In South Korea, where the film opened on November 19, it has sold about 64,000 tickets and quickly slipped down the local box-office chart, with commentators pointing to its three-hour running time and repetitive stage sequences as barriers for mainstream audiences. Upcoming festival screenings and the planned North American rollout will test how far this kabuki saga can travel beyond the domestic market that turned it into a record-breaking hit.
