Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron Opens Strong Despite No Promotion

If you didn’t know there's a new Studio Ghibli film coming out, you’re probably not alone - The Boy and the Heron has had no marketing. That means no trailers, no TV spots, no cast announcements, and not even a plot summary.

Despite the lack of promotion, The Boy and the Heron is Studio Ghibli’s biggest opening in history, earning $13.2 (1.83 billion yen) from Friday to Sunday, according to ComScore. The film is also Studio Ghibli’s first on Imax, where it set another record, earning the most across three days for Japan’s giant screen operator. Meanwhile in America, The Flash closes its theatrical run with a lower domestic box office than Green Lantern.

The Boy and the Heron is a grand fantasy loosely inspired by Japanese author Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 coming-of-age novel How Do You Live?, which follows a young boy after the death of his father. All that Studio Ghibli has released in promotion of the film, however, is a single poster.

Lead producer Toshio Suzuki spoke with Japanese magazine Bungei Shunji in June on the decision to eschew marketing: “As part of company operations, over the years Ghibli has wanted people to come see the movies we’ve made. So we’ve thought about that and done a lot of different things for that purpose — but this time we were like, ‘Eh, we don’t need to do that.’”

“Doing the same thing you’ve done before, over and over, you get tired of it. So we wanted to do something different. So, no trailers or TV commercials at all…No newspaper ads either. Deep down, I think this is what moviegoers latently desire.”

Outside of Japan, The Boy and the Heron is tipped for an international premiere at the Venice Film Festival, which starts August 30, and is expected to get released in North America later this year.