Then and Now: Imported Films at the Japanese Box Office, 1990–2025
Imported films held the larger income share throughout Japan's nineties. By 2025, Japanese films held the larger share of ticket receipts. Reading that change begins with the labels above the figures.
What the numbers measured
Eiren, the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan, separates Japanese and imported films in its annual statistics. For the 1990s, the category shares measure distributor income (配給収入). From 2000 onward, the shares measure box-office gross (興行収入), and the table no longer supplies distributor-income data. Both are money measures, but they count different stages of a film's earnings. Box-office gross describes ticket receipts; distributor income describes income at the distribution stage.
The Eiren statistics table therefore contains a boundary as well as a sequence of years. Imports took 68.1% of distributor income in 1999 and 68.2% of box-office gross in 2000. Their near-identical percentages should not disguise the change of measure. A comparison across that boundary can establish which category led in each period, but it cannot give an exact change in the same income share. Admissions, release counts, and screen counts supply other perspectives; none can be substituted for a revenue share.
The imported decade in figures
Imported films exceeded half of distributor income in every year from 1990 through 1999. Their distributor-income share was 58.6% in 1990, 54.9% in 1992, and 64.2% in 1993. It stood at 63.0% in 1995, 63.7% in 1996, and 58.5% in 1997, before reaching the decade's high of 69.8% in 1998. The 1999 distributor-income share was still 68.1%. These figures describe a sustained lead, with substantial variation inside the decade.
The yearly leaders give that broad category some recognizable titles. In Eiren's 1996 list, Mission: Impossible led the imports with ¥3,600 million in distributor income, ahead of Se7en at ¥2,650 million and Twister at ¥2,300 million. The 1997 list places Independence Day at ¥6,650 million in distributor income and The Lost World at ¥5,800 million. In the 1998 list, Titanic earned ¥16,000 million in distributor income, more than three times the top domestic film's ¥5,000 million in distributor income. That was also the year imports reached their highest distributor-income share of the decade. The two observations sit together without proving that one title caused the annual result.
The rooms changed too. Japan's national screen count reached its decade low of 1,734 in 1993, rose to 1,828 in 1996, and ended 1999 at 2,221. This counts screens across the market, not art-house venues or their programs. It helps describe exhibition capacity while leaving the experience of a particular screening to a different kind of history.
2025: a larger crowd, a domestic market
The 2025 national overview, published in January 2026, reports ¥274,452 million in total box-office gross and 188,756 thousand admissions. Admissions were 130.7% of 2024's 144,441 thousand. The average admission fee was ¥1,454. These figures describe a larger theatrical audience than in the preceding year; they do not identify who attended or how often individual viewers returned.
Japanese films took 75.6% of 2025 box-office gross, leaving imports 24.4%, compared with an imported box-office-gross share of 24.7% in 2024. The 2025 release count was 1,305 films, including 611 imports. A title counts once in the release total regardless of its earnings, so a broad selection can coexist with a smaller revenue share. Eiren's 2025 list of releases grossing at least ¥1 billion includes 38 Japanese titles and 12 imports. Its top import, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, earned ¥5.28 billion in box-office gross. The shared franchise name with the 1996 leader invites recognition, but the amounts use different measures.
The falling imported share between 2024 and 2025 does not mean imported ticket revenue fell. Eiren records imported box-office gross of ¥51,183 million in 2024 and ¥66,883 million in 2025, while Japanese films' box-office gross rose from ¥155,800 million to ¥207,569 million. Both categories earned more, but domestic receipts grew faster. This is why percentages need their totals beside them: a category can gain revenue and still lose a little of the market share. Nor does the higher release count measure success film by film. A year's many titles can have very different receipts, and the category total cannot reveal how evenly the earnings were spread among them.
Japan had 3,697 screens in 2025, with 3,305 in cinema complexes. That total is larger than the national screen counts cited for the nineties. It does not show how many screens any imported film occupied, how long it stayed, or whether its audience overlapped with another title's.
The nineties on the big screen again
The same 2025 overview lists a 4K digital remaster of Princess Mononoke with ¥1.28 billion in box-office gross. Eiren's 1997 list records the original film's July opening and ¥11,760 million in distributor income. The film thus appears in theatrical earnings lists for both periods. Those totals cannot be added as though they were the same measure, or used alone to compare the audiences for the two runs. They do provide a concrete example of a nineties title returning to theatrical circulation.
Reading the gap
A national income share describes a market; it cannot rank the lasting importance of every film within it. An annual leader describes a conspicuous success, rather than the full range of viewing. Screen totals describe capacity without describing taste. Keep those questions separate and the comparison becomes more useful: the nineties' imported-film lead and 2025's domestic-film lead each have a clear statistical basis, while the reasons for individual films' appeal require closer reading.