Chiikawa Is the Biggest Film in Japan This Year, and It Just Took Over Korea Too

Photo: Micael Widell, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

If you have not heard of Chiikawa, you are about to. Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of the Mermaid Island opened in Japan on July 24, passed ten billion yen in a month, and on September 20 it overtook Zootopia 2 to become the highest-grossing film of 2026 in Japan. The total is now a little over 18 billion yen, which is around 115 million dollars, for a film about three tiny round creatures who are perpetually broke and slightly terrified.

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Then it went to Korea. It opened there on September 30, passed a million admissions in ten days, and it has now topped the Korean weekend box office four times in a row. The weekend of October 23 to 25 it took 2.5 million dollars from 320,000 admissions and 44 percent of the whole market, against a new Yeon Sang-ho thriller and Street Fighter. It is past three million tickets in Korea, which is extraordinary for a Japanese anime with no franchise history there.

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The manga by Nagano started as a Twitter comic and became a merchandising empire in Japan before the film. The appeal is hard to explain to someone who has not seen it. The characters are cute, the world is quietly cruel, and the stories are about small kindnesses in a place that does not reward them. The film keeps that tone and adds a mermaid island and a plot about a friend who goes missing.

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There is still no US release announced. Box Office Mojo lists 159 million dollars in international grosses and nothing domestic, which for a film this big in two of the world's top five markets is strange. Toho handles it themselves in Asia, and I suspect a US deal is a matter of time and subtitling.

Photo: The Conmunity, Pop Culture Geek, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I have watched the series on a loop for months and I need to see this in a cinema with other people who will cry at a hedgehog. Have you encountered Chiikawa yet, and did it get its hooks in?