If you look at the exchange rate, they are drastically different for the two weekends. That’s why I always report the figures in yen, because Box Office Mojo uses a different exchange rate every week, hence skewing their dollar figures.

Hero - USD$8,709,670 x 113.434 yen= 987972706 yen.
Hana Yori Dango - USD$9,631,782 x 106.168 yen= 1022587031.376 yen

But yes, in this sense, it seems like my source (Eiga Consultant) either has the figures wrong, or Box Office Mojo has it wrong, or it’s my Japanese problem.

As for admission is higher, but less money. I actually had the official admissions, and I simply divided that with the total figures to get an average ticket price each person paid. A movie that attracts a larger adult audience would see a much larger average ticket price, since the difference between a student ticket and an adult ticket is 300 yen. Using figures I have:

Hana Yori Dango - approx. 850,000 admissions/1022587031.376 yen = 1206 yen average ticket price.

Gururi no Koto (source: http://eigaconsultant.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2008/06/post_a624.html) - 4033 admissions/6,250,000 yen = 1549 yen average ticket price.

This means Hana Yori Dango brought in more people per screen. But since Gururi no Koto was playing only on 2 screens, it had a higher per-screen average because people paid more for a ticket.

Per-screen average simply means how much money each theater brought in. It doesn’t clearly represent how many people actually went to see the movie, which is why I always argued that people who report box office stats need to reveal both admission figures and dollar figures to get a true sense of what film is bringing in what people. If Hero has a lower admission figures, as well as lower per-screen average, then one can say Hero appealed to a similar age group (because of Kimura Takuya).

And also, you say that when admission is higher but the $$ made is less, that probably means most of the movie audience was very young. That’s wrong. Because HERO was in 475 theatres and HYD is in 400. Plus, HYD screen average is 24.000 while Hero was 18.336. So yeah…

Are you sure the info in your last post wasn’t wrong?

http://boxofficemojo.com/intl/japan/?yr=2007&wk=36&p=.htm
http://boxofficemojo.com/intl/japan/?yr=2008&wk=26&p=.htm