EXCLUSIVE: Perfect Days, the comeback feature from legendary German filmmaker Wim Wenders, has become boutique operator Curzon Cinemas‘s longest-running film after passing 30 continuous weeks this past Friday.
Perfect Days has played at Curzon Bloomsbury in London for 206 continuous days. The film passes Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, which played for 26 continuous weeks, to become the operator’s longest-running title under modern tracking. Perfect Days is currently the 7th highest-grossing film at Curzon Bloomsbury of all time.
Wenders’s quietly radical, Tokyo-set drama, stars Japanese actor Koji Yakusho as a man with a love of trees and literature who mysteriously opts for a simple life by working as a toilet cleaner. The film debuted in Competition at Cannes in 2023 where Yakusho won Best Actor.
All rights on the film for the UK, LATAM, India, and Turkey were acquired by Mubi from The Match Factory at Cannes 2023. The pic recorded some of Wenders’s strongest opening box office figures across territories and has continued to play well with audiences. The film’s widest UK release was 135 screens. UK box office currently sits at £1,386,958, Wenders’ biggest-ever film in the UK. The pic has also played a consecutive 30 weeks at Bristol Watershed, another house record. The last longest-running film at Watershed was Mark Jenkin’s Bait, which showed for 18 weeks. Perfect Days is now also Wenders’s biggest film in Mexico after 25 weeks in cinemas. Mubi opened the film in LATAM on February 15. The film clocked $1,315,616 over 348,025 admissions.
Perfect Days has recorded monster box office elsewhere with €5.5 million in Italy with more than 800K admissions over 12 weeks in cinemas. Other standout figures collected by The Match Factory and Mubi include €3 million with more than 440K admissions in France, €3.6 million in Germany with more than 370K admissions, and $3.5 million in North America after 10 weeks in cinemas and 320K admissions. Neon released the film in the U.S.
Curzon told us they are in contact with Mubi to lock Perfect Days in for another week on the big screen, pushing the pic to 31 continuous weeks. Other long-running modern titles at Curzon Cinemas include Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, which famously played for 24 weeks at Curzon Soho. Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon played for 23 weeks at the same cinema in 2001. Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera has also clocked a strong 18 weeks at Bloomsbury.
Perfect Days is still some weeks off the record year-long run of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). The ICA played the film’s 159-minute director’s cut for 52 continuous weeks as part of an unofficial residency. Colm Bairéad’s Oscar-nominated pic The Quiet Girl also played for a straight year at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin.
