“It was all a coincidence,” Toho CEO Matsuoka Hiro said this afternoon during a Q&A at the Tokyo Film Festival when quizzed on his company’s decision to re-enter the U.S. market in 2023 to distribute Takashi Yamazaki’s box-office hit Godzilla Minus One.
Godzilla Minus One opened Stateside in December 2023 and earned more than $11.4 million on opening weekend, becoming the biggest Stateside debut of a foreign film that year and the highest-grossing live-action Japanese film in North America.
Matsuoka told an audience at this afternoon’s Q&A alongside AMPAS CEO Bill Kramer that until Godzilla Minus One, Toho had repeatedly failed to successfully distribute its films outside Japan, particularly in the United States.
The veteran exec said he only refocused efforts on launching a film in the U.S. after he visited the exhibitors union during a Stateside trip and was told the U.S. studios weren’t making enough films to satisfy audience appetite.
“When I became president of Toho, I went to the U.S. and the people from the box office union said the studios weren’t making enough films,” Matsuoka said.
“They said to me, ‘Why don’t you think of making some anime,’ and that’s when I realized anime was popular in the US. We also already had Godzilla, so we decided to distribute it in the US.”
Matsuoka said there was concern across Toho when he first suggested they distribute Godzilla Minus One across the U.S. themselves. But the film was ultimately a success, and most importantly, he said, “brought the profit to us.”
“It wasn’t a strategy; we just tried,” Matsuoka added.
Next week, the latest Godzilla film, Godzilla Minus Zero, will open in Japan and the U.S. following its bow at the Tokyo Film Festival. Toho’s label GKIDS will distribute the film across North America beginning November 6.
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