The hype is indeed real as the new film of the My Hero Academia franchise called My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising ranked third in the Japanese box office on its opening weekend. The film premiered on December 20 and has sold around 224,000 tickets on the first three days alone. The film has earned 422,479,000 yen (USD $3.86 million) so far.

Japanese website Eiga expects the second anime film of the franchise will earn more than its first film My Hero Academia: Two Heroes which earned a total of 1.72 billion yen (around USD$15.7 million) in Japan.

The original creator of the manga Kohei Horikoshi handles overall supervision for the second movie as well as character designs. Kenji Nagasaki and Yousuke Kuroda is respectively the film’s director and scriptwriter. Yoshihiko Umakoshi handles the character design, and Yuuki Hayaki is in charge of music. The film is animated by BONES.

The movie’s theme song titled “Higher Ground” is performed by Japanese rock band sumika.

My Hero Academia was first published in the Weekly Shonen Jump in 2014. The anime adaptation’s fourth season premiered on October 2019. The manga is licensed and officially released in English by VIZ Media with Caleb Cook credited as translator. It is both released in print and digital formats.

Screening for the film in US and Canada are slated to be on Early 2020 as recently announced by Funimation. They have also released the film’s synopsis which reveals:

“Class 1-A visits Nabu Island where they finally get to do some real hero work. The place is so peaceful that it’s more like a vacation … until they’re attacked by a villain with an unfathomable Quirk! His power is eerily familiar, and it looks like Shigaraki had a hand in the plan. But with All Might retired and citizens’ lives on the line, there’s no time for questions. Deku and his friends are the next generation of heroes, and they’re the island’s only hope.”

It was stated during the Hero Fest last August by Horikoshi that this movie will be last of the franchise because “there won’t be third film. Probably.” He elaborated on this, saying that the film is a finale of sorts to the series as the battles and story of the film is how he sees the manga’s final battle. He then teased that the film will have more “Plus Ultra” moments compared to the first film. So this is definitely a movie worth looking forward to.

As of this time, it’s still not for certain if the movie will be released for other countries. We will look forward to more announcements soon.

This year, the My Hero Academia manga won this year’s Harvey Awards for Best Manga. The Harvey Awards is annual event which which gives recognitions for outstanding works in graphic art and comic book categories. The said awarding was held during the New York City Comic Con that happened last October.

The manga series competed against other popular manga works like ONE’s Mob Psycho 100, Junji Ito’s Frankenstein: Junji Ito Story Collection, Kamome Shirahama’s Witch Hat Atelier¸ Junji Ito’s Smashed, and Yuhki Kamatani’s Our Dreams At Dusk: Shimanami Tasogare.

Other nominations in the Harvey Awards were Tony Valente’s Radiant for Best European Book and Alita: Battle Angel for Best Adaptation From a Comic of Graphic Novel. Unfortunately, both titles did not win the respective awards.

Last year’s winner for the Best Manga in the Harvey Awards went to Nakata Kabi’s popular yuri manga My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness.

My Hero Academia also dominated the Monthly Bookscan List a few months ago. In our previous report, the manga volumes were included in the U.S. Monthly Bookscan List for the month of February. This not the first time that the series has reached the top of the manga sales ranks as it has also entered the rankings in some of the previous months.

The BookScan rankings (which covers about 85% of the U.S. trade print book market) collect data sales from more than 16,000 location including independent bookshops, online purchases, and even popular bookstores like Barnes & Noble. Sales from Walmart.com, comic book stores, and related were not included in the sales count.

The June ranking have previous volumes of My Hero Academia in the ranks with volume 19 topping the charts. The full list of the rankings can be seen below:

• #1 — Kōhei Horikoshi’s My Hero Academia volume 19

• #2 — Kōhei Horikoshi’s My Hero Academia volume 1

• #4 — Tomohito Oda’s Komi Can’t Communicate volume 1

• #5 — Kōhei Horikoshi’s My Hero Academia volume 2

• #6 — Sankichi Hinodeya’s Splatoon volume 6

• #8 — Kōhei Horikoshi’s My Hero Academia volume 3

• #11 — Kōhei Horikoshi’s My Hero Academia volume 18

• #12 — Kaiu Shirai and Posuka Demizu’s The Promised Neverlandvolume 10

• #13 — ONE and Yūsuke Murata’s One-Punch Man volume 16

• #14 — Junji Ito’s Smashed: Junji Ito Story Collection

• #15 — Kentarou Miura’s Berserk Deluxe volume 1

• #18 — Kōhei Horikoshi’s My Hero Academia volume 4

• #19 — Kōhei Horikoshi’s My Hero Academia volume 17

We can’t wait for the upcoming My Hero Academia movie. Be sure to keep their voices good as we will shout PLUS ULTRA again very soon.

Source: ANN