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Shin Watanabe Award Honors One Piece Creator Eiichiro Oda

The Watanabe Foundation for Music & Culture of the Watanabe Production company presented One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda with its Shin Watanabe award, which honors producers who promote the development of pop culture, on Thursday. Oda received the award, not just for creating the One Piece series, but also for his work in producing the One Piece Film Red anime.

One Piece Film Red opened in Japan on December 3. The movie has become the franchise's highest-selling and highest-earning film installment, in terms of both the number of tickets sold and yen earned at the box office.

The film ranked at #1 in its opening weekend. The film sold 847,000 tickets and earned 1,295,808,780 yen (about US$9.50 million) over its opening weekend. It has sold a total of 14.27 million tickets, and has earned a cumulative total of 19.7 billion yen (about US$152 million), as of January 30.

The film has surpassed Howl's Moving Castle as the #5 highest-earning anime film in Japan. Moreover, the film has earned the equivalent of 31.9 billion yen (about US$246.5 million) worldwide, thus surpassing Howl's Moving Castle as the #4 highest-earning anime film globally.

The film is also the #8 highest-earning film of all time in Japan and topped Japan's box office for 2022 in terms of yen earned and tickets sold.

Crunchyroll released One Piece Film Red in the United States and Canada on November 4, and in Australia and New Zealand on November 3. The film crossed US$12,768,073 in its second week in the United States, ranking at #8 at the U.S. box office.

Oda began serializing the One Piece manga in Weekly Shonen Jump on July 19, 1997.

Aniplex president and producer Atsuhiro Iwakami received the Shin Watanabe award in 2021. The foundation also posthumously awarded composer Katsuhisa Hattori with its special award that year and Dragon Quest series composer Kōichi Sugiyama with the special award last year.

Source: Comic Natalie