The Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale anime film sold about 308,376 tickets for 425,762,760 yen (about US$3.76 milion) to top the Japanese box office during the February 18-19 weekend. The film opened in Japan on Saturday in 151 theaters. It is the first anime film to rank #1 in both weekend attendance and weekend box office receipt totals since Makoto Shinkai's your name. It also set the opening-weekend record among films distributed by Aniplex.

The film's per-screen average was 2.82 million yen (US$24,900). The Eiga.com website reports that the final box office tally of the film could eventually surpass 2.5 billion yen (US$22 million). The website added that the movie's sold-out screenings attracted middle and high school students in groups and couples, as well as novel and anime fans in their 30s and 40s. Screenings of the film using the immersive 4DX and MX4D technologies will start on March 10 in 66 theaters nationwide.

Reki Kawahara's original light novel series has 19 million copies in circulation worldwide.

The weekend's #3 film, the live-action version of Matcha Hazuki's One Week Friends manga, sold 125,000 tickets for 153 million yen (US$1.35 million). That is 62.4% of the first-week total of another manga-based film from last year, Your Lie in April. Eiga.com reports that the One Week Friends film's current target is 1 billion yen (US$9 million).

#9's In This Corner of the World has now played in up to 301 screens in its 15 consecutive weeks in the box office top 10. It has now sold a cumulative total of 1.66 million tickets for over 2.16 billion yen (US$19 million). It has thus surpassed two other 2016 films, Pokémon the Movie: Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel (2.15 billion yen) and Crayon Shin-chan Bakusui! Yumemi World Dai Totsugeki (2.11 billion yen), and it is closing in on the year's #10 Japanese domestic film, A Silent Voice (2.3 billion yen).

Sources: Mainichi Shimbun's Mantan Web, Eiga.com, Movie Walker