Japan All-Time Anime Box Office 2026: Detective Conan Hits No. 16 as Mario Galaxy Crosses $1 Billion

🍿 The upper reaches of Japan's all-time box office chart are packed with anime. Even on the overall list, the top two spots belong to Demon Slayer and third place is Spirited Away. So what happens if you build the all-time ranking out of anime alone? Right now, two movies are shaking that chart up at the same time: Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway has passed 13.03 billion yen (about $81 million) to become the 16th-biggest anime film ever in Japan, while The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has crossed $1 billion worldwide and is closing in on Japan's overall all-time top 100.

The all-time anime ranking: Demon Slayer's twin peaks, then Ghibli, Shinkai, and Conan

Pull the Japanese anime films out of the all-time top 100 compiled by Kogyo Tsushinsha, the trade body that tracks Japanese box office (as of June 7, 2026), and this is the ranking you get. The right-hand column shows each film's position on the overall chart, live action and foreign films included.

Dollar figures throughout this article are rough conversions at the current rate of about 160 yen to the dollar.

Look at the names: Demon Slayer's twin peaks at the top, then four Ghibli films, three by Makoto Shinkai, four Conan films, and the big Jump-franchise features. Japan has only ever had two films cross the 40-billion-yen mark, and both belong to the same franchise. There's hardly another market in the world where you'll find that.

One note: The Super Mario Bros. Movie (14.02 billion yen, No. 22 overall) is US-made Illumination animation, so it isn't included in the table above.

The overall chart tells the same story. Fourteen of its top 20 films are animated, and twelve of those are Japanese anime once you set aside Disney's two entries. The highest-ranked live-action film is Titanic at No. 4 (27.77 billion yen), and more than 28 years after release, no non-animated film has beaten it. The live-action Japanese record belongs to Kokuho (2025, 20.81 billion yen) at No. 8.

Count tickets instead of yen, and the view shifts

Box office is shaped by ticket prices, though. According to Eiren (the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan), the average admission price in Japan rose nearly 20 percent, from 1,226 yen in 2001 to 1,454 yen in 2025. The same 10 billion yen meant more actual moviegoers back then. So here are the major films whose admission numbers are known.

1: As announced in May 2021 when the film crossed 40 billion yen; the final count rose further. 2: Admissions as reported for the original run. Gross includes 880 million yen added by the 2020 re-release.

Lined up this way, the two Demon Slayer giants beat Spirited Away's original attendance by millions of tickets even at today's higher prices, so they sit at the top not just in money but in actual moviegoers. A cumulative 27.46 million admissions works out to roughly one ticket for every four to five people in Japan. One caveat: admission counts for Titanic and other pre-2000s films were never published in the same way, so the all-time ranking remains strictly a revenue comparison.

Conan's 8.83 million is a running total, and at this pace the 10-million mark is within reach. Mario's Japanese admissions haven't been announced, but dividing its 7.37 billion yen by today's average ticket price gives a back-of-the-envelope figure of around 5 million, which by the same math puts the first Mario movie (14.02 billion yen) at roughly 10 million.

Conan's spring ritual: four straight 10-billion-yen films

The film charging up the chart from below is Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway, the 29th movie in the franchise. It opened on April 10 across 526 theaters in Japan and pulled in 2.32 million admissions and 3.50 billion yen in its first three days, the biggest opening in series history at 101.8 percent of last year's One-eyed Flashback.

By May 6, its 27th day in theaters, it had reached 10.88 billion yen, making it the fourth consecutive Conan film to clear the 10-billion mark after Black Iron Submarine (2023), The Million-dollar Pentagram (2024), and One-eyed Flashback (2025). No other Japanese film series has ever done that four years running. Released every April and drawing families and hardcore fans alike, the annual Conan movie has become a fixture of Japanese spring.

As of June 7, per Kogyo Tsushinsha, the film stands at 8.83 million admissions and 13.03 billion yen, good for No. 32 on the overall chart, just below Frozen 2 (13.37 billion yen). Among anime it's the 16th-biggest ever, and waiting just above it are Jujutsu Kaisen 0 (13.89 billion yen) and Black Iron Submarine (13.88 billion yen), sitting practically side by side. Less than 900 million yen more would take both of them out in one move. The series record belongs to The Million-dollar Pentagram at 15.80 billion yen, and in total, eight Conan films now sit inside Japan's overall top 100. No other franchise occupies the chart like that.

This year's story is set in Yokohama and built around motorcycle cop Chihaya Hagiwara, unfolding as a high-speed "battle mystery" on the expressway, directed by Takahiro Hasui with a theme song by MISIA. Overseas, it hits theaters in the UK and Ireland on June 12 through distributor Trinity CineAsia, and the series has historically gone on to strong theatrical runs across China and Southeast Asia, so a wider international rollout is expected to follow.

A billion-dollar Mario, waiting at the door of the top 100

The other film in motion is The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, the second collaboration between Nintendo and Illumination. It opened on April 1 in the US and many other markets, then on April 24 in Japan. Per Box Office Mojo, its worldwide total reached $1,000,028,930 as of June 7, eleven weeks into release. That's short of the $1.3 billion-plus earned by 2023's The Super Mario Bros. Movie, but a massive hit for a sequel by any measure.

In Japan, seven weeks of release have brought in 7.375 billion yen (about $46 million), enough to pass Despicable Me 3 (2017, 7.32 billion yen). That makes Galaxy the second-highest-grossing Illumination film ever in Japan, behind only the first Mario movie (14.02 billion yen, No. 22 all time), so both of Illumination's biggest Japanese hits now belong to Mario. It also keeps setting the record for foreign films released in Japan in 2026.

Here's the fun part: the cutoff for Japan's overall all-time top 100 currently sits at 7.65 billion yen, shared at No. 99 by Godzilla Minus One and Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet. Mario Galaxy is less than 300 million yen away. A film that's a billion-dollar juggernaut globally is, in Japan, politely knocking on the door of 100th place.

The chart as a mirror

Look at the global all-time list and you'll see Avatar and Marvel at the top. Japan's chart is a different ecosystem entirely. Demon Slayer, Ghibli, Makoto Shinkai, Conan: homegrown animation holds the summit, and even Hollywood's biggest current hit enters Japan through a Nintendo-shaped door.

Two things to watch in the coming weeks: whether Conan can pass Jujutsu Kaisen 0 and Black Iron Submarine to keep climbing the all-time anime ranking, and whether Mario crosses the 7.65-billion-yen line to write its name into the all-time top 100. Both answers should arrive before summer.

So here's the question: what's the all-time box office No. 1 in your country, and what does that list say about what your audiences love?

References

• https://animeanime.jp/article/2026/06/08/99887.html
• https://animeanime.jp/article/2026/06/08/99888.html
• https://www.kogyotsushin.com/archives/alltime/
• https://www.eiren.org/toukei/data.html
• https://www.famitsu.com/article/202604/71571
• https://www.famitsu.com/news/202105/24221493.html
• https://www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/release/en/2026/260310.html
• https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2026-06-07/detective-conan-fallen-angel-of-the-highway-will-be-released-in-uk-and-ireland-on-friday/.238230