The Bleach live action was actually quite decent. Shame it didnt do well in the box office because a sequel would've been fucking fantastic.
Have any of you seen it? How would you compare it to other live adaptations from WSJ?
Unfortunately Bleach really underperformed. Warner Brothers and production team really overestimated Bleach. Summer is always a competitive film season as most blockbuster potential and foreign hits are released to capitalize on a long vacation. If you fail to generate a buzz, you will be cut off by theater conglomerates in no time. Opening a 135 Million Yen weekend won't help, and worse, it fell quickly than it should. The first week is ironically the best to perform since it opened with only Mirai (not a competition). There's also 2nd week from Jurassic and Pokemon, and the remains of Solo: A Star Wars Story, which did perform decent. Enter 2nd Week then we have Code Blue- the most sucessful Live Action in 2018 earing 8.7B Yen, but then the rest should decline normally. Bleach totaled ¥360,000,000, which is bad, but not terrible. And then enter the third week.
With Code Blue earning Bleach total numbers... per day! XD-here comes 5 new films in the Bleach's third week: Incredibles2, MIFallout, MHA, Sensei Kunsun, and Kamen Rider. Two are big hits, and three are playing on 1M line. So basically Bleach window for showing off is 2 weeks, which is considered normal for most films. Unfortunately the sales don't match, so film owners normally have to cut more seats for the movies above. And then it underperformed again with limited seats (generally, movies on 3rd weeks onwards have fewer seats, but the ratio between attendance and seats should be higher). So in just a month, Bleach dropped so hard it never recovered again. Sales barely reaching 500M Yen after 2 months (In comparison Pokemon and Gintama 2 opened with 500M+ in 2 days)
Long story short, regardless of western fans saying it's good or great the Japanese doesn't think so highly as we are. Well at best, it is an average movie. I think 3.1/5 from Filmarks, and 3.2/5 from Eiga. Not bad.
On defense WB did really fine on promotion, and even manage to get Alexandros to perform the the theme song. Unfortunately it was a building disaster from the beginning. When you see a Japanese Movie trailer/announcement filled with English comment (praising, ranting, asking for anime) instead of native once, it's a bad sign. It also opened on 320+ screens, more than or in par with domestic movies, so the conglomerates have a decent expectation for it to perform.
Generally, shonen or manga adaptation are not candidates for blockbuster but Bleach really bombed . Im not sure how huge the production cost, but recent battle shonens/seinen are bad was well. JoJo, Tokyo Ghoul and FMA (It opened really good, but fell way to hard during the second week and never recovered).
The only manga Live Action really did well as far I can remember are 1) Rookies 2)Boys Over Flower 3) Kenshin 4) Death Note 4)AoT 5)Assassination Classroom and 6) Gintama.
