"Special Fan Preview" earns US$1.5 million

The Box Office Mojo website reported on Thursday that Makoto Shinkai's Weathering With You anime film earned US$1,586,217 and ranked #2 at the United States box office for Wednesday. It ranked below 1917 and above Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker. Fathom Events is screening the film in theaters in the United States on Wednesday and Thursday . The screenings are a "Special Fan Preview" with exclusive bonus content before GKIDS opens the film in North America on Friday . The screenings starting on Friday will have both English-subtitled screenings and English-dubbed screenings.

The English dub cast includes:

Brandon Engman as Hodaka

Ashley Boettcher as Hina

Lee Pace as Suga

Alison Brie as Natsumi

Emeka Guindo as Nagi

Riz Ahmed as Takai

Vinnie Penna as Kimura

Mike Pollock as Yasui

Barbara Goodson as Tachibana

GKIDS describes the film's story:

The summer of his high school freshman year, Hodaka runs away from his remote island home to Tokyo, and quickly finds himself pushed to his financial and personal limits. The weather is unusually gloomy and rainy every day, as if to suggest his future. He lives his days in isolation, but finally finds work as a writer for a mysterious occult magazine. Then one day, Hodaka meets Hina on a busy street corner. This bright and strong­willed girl possesses a strange and wonderful ability: the power to stop the rain and clear the sky...

Weathering With You opened in 359 theaters and 448 screens in Japan last July. The film sold 1,159,020 tickets for 1,643,809,400 yen (about US$15.22 million) in its first three days. The anime ranked #1 in its opening weekend. The film had earned 14.02 billion yen (about US$129 million) as of December 8. The film is now the #7 highest-earning domestic film of all time in Japan and was the highest-grossing film in Japan in 2019.

The anime won the Audience Award at the Animation Is Film Festival in Los Angeles in October, and also won the Best Animated Feature Film at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards in Australia on November 21. The film received a nomination in the Best Animated Independent Feature category for the 47th Annual Annie Awards. The Annie Awards ceremony will be held on January 25, 2020.

The film was submitted for consideration for both the Animated Feature Film category and the Best International Feature Film category for the 92nd Academy Awards. The film did not receive a nominationin either category. It is also nominated for Animation of the Year for the Japan Academy Film Prize Association's 43rd annual awards this year. The Palm Springs International Film Festival in California also screened the film earlier this month.

Thanks to Daniel Zelter and Austin Ryden for the news tip.

Source: Box Office Mojo (link 2)