Takeshi Kobayashi and Shunji Iwai's "Bandage" sells 70,000 advance tickets

by Chris MaGee

Well, we knew that the online anticipation for the Shunji Iwai scripted and Takeshi Kobayashi directed film "Bandage" was pretty intense. You just need to read back over our own coverage of the project that stretches back over a year. Seeing that Iwai, who got his start directing music videos for some of Japan's biggest stars in the late 80's and early 90's, and Kobayashi, who wrote the music for Iwai's brilliant 2001 film "All About Lily Chou-Chou" were teaming up to tell the story of an indie rock band called LANDS we can easily see why there's a lot of excitement surrounding this film... but who would have thought there would have been this much excitement?

According to Tokyograph advance tickets went on sale for "Bandage" last Saturday in Japan and moviegoers were quick to scoop them up. 70,000 advance tickets were sold on that very first day, and that take has broken records in Japan for advance ticket sales.

To accompany this boom in advance interest in "Bandage" the lead single from the film's soundtrack, and from the film's fictitious band LANDS headed up by KAT-TUN lead singer Jin Akanishi was released and immediately went to number one on the Japanese pop charts. Give it a listen (and a look) below.