Spirited Away is highest grossing animated film of all time

[Joe Tully]

From www.cartoonresearch.com/news.html

Disney won't release it - No North American distribution in sight - but Hayao Miyazaki's SPIRITED AWAY is the highest grossing animated feature in the world without benefit a U.S. release! Not only that, it's the highest grossing foreign language film in history to gross $200 million outside North America.
According to an article in today's Daily Variety by Don Groves and Lukas Schwarzacher "It's already the highest-earning Japanese film ever, and is on course to become that market's all-time box office champ, overtaking ``Titanic,'' which made $219.5 million.
Playing in its 13th week in Japan, the Hayao Miyazaki-directed picture reached $199.3 million Tuesday, according to local distributor Toho, which means it will cross $200 million Friday or Saturday."
``Princess Mononoke,'' also directed by Miyazaki, was the previous homegrown box office champ, notching $163.5 million. Only four foreign-language films have earned more than $100 million outside North America. In addition to the Japanese duo, the others are Italy's ``Life Is Beautiful,'' which grossed $157.6 million, and the French-German co-production ``Asterix & Obelix vs. Caesar.''

Feel free to leave any suggestions or comments for Disney below.

[Leaping Larry Jojo]

And before Spirited Away, there was box office champ Mononoke, which Disney brands as a failure. I don't think Spirited Away will be here for a while. Thank goodness I'm still young.

[The Mad Hatter]

(bonking head against computer monitor)

My kingdom for a fansub...

[Calhoun07]

Is there a petition I can sign somewhere?

[Joe Tully]

There is a petition to release more Miyazaki films at

http://www.petitiononline.com/3104/petition.html

Right now it is at 7032 signatures.

[Maxie Zeus]

So how come Disney is the one with the rights to these things locked away? Granted, they are no more intelligent than any other major studio, but why do they get to decide not to release things like this?

[The Mad Hatter]

You'd think that if they even did just a small DVD release, they'd still make a little bit of profit. That's what they're in business for, right? I can't imagine they've invested a lot of cash into this, since all they did was hand over a bit of money for a movie that's already finished. And since they've got the rights anyway, all they're doing is losing money.

[Joe Tully]

Originally posted by Maxie Zeus
So how come Disney is the one with the rights to these things locked away? Granted, they are no more intelligent than any other major studio, but why do they get to decide not to release things like this?

Disney signed a deal with Miyazaki's company regarding the international releases of his films. Any films that are released by Miyazaki anytime soon, Disney is the only one that can develop an international release. Disney also controls video rights.

[Leaping Larry Jojo]

I heard that Disney doesn't have the DVD rights to these movies. So some companies could very well pick them up. But this is just rumour. Apparently, they had to negotiate to get the Mononoke DVD.