A few days before the Tokyo International Film Festival brought the international industry together in Japan last week, a group of Hollywood and Japanese production veterans gathered in a skyscraper above Tokyo’s neon-lit Shibuya district to discuss the renewed appeal of the country as a global content hub.
Japan has punched above its weight on the global cultural stage for generations, but Hollywood studios have long regarded the country as one of the world’s most challenging places to shoot. A recent wave of international interest in Japanese culture and content, though, has many producers rethinking old assumptions.
The discussion came at a time when Japan is attracting unprecedented attention from the global production community. The yen’s historic weakness has made the country more cost-competitive than ever, while a string of acclaimed series and films — from FX’s Shōgun to Oscar-winning blockbuster Godzilla Minus One — have spotlighted the power of Japanese IP. International streamers such as Netflix and Apple TV+ are rapidly increasing their Japan-set projects, and local officials have begun to expand incentive programs in hopes of turning that creative momentum into sustained production growth.
“There has been a wonderfully shocking series of successful movies and television shows that are inspiring more and more producers to come here,” said producer Janet Yang, outgoing president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who was one of the closed-door gathering’s key participants. “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle has been one of the most-watched movies anywhere, Kokuho has revitalized the Japanese box office, and films like Godzilla Minus One and Drive My Car were recent Oscar winners. Hopefully, this is just the beginning,” Yang added, “because there is an incredible pool of talent that exists in the Eastern Hemisphere and Hollywood is rapidly changing — there’s more interest and willingness to truly collaborate with Japanese storytellers than ever before.”
The Tokyo gathering was organized by Japan-based production service company Studio Muso and Southeast Asian firm Indochina Productions, which recently produced The White Lotus Season 3 in Thailand. To showcase Japan’s improved practicality and affordability as a shooting location, the companies invited a select group of international producers on a week-long tour of the country’s sites, soundstages and production facilities. The skyscraper seminar was organized as an opportunity for participants to share their takeaways with a select crowd of Japanese industry and government figures. Participants included Yang, Shōgun producer Eriko Miyagawa, Alien: Romulus director Fede Álvarez, Ravi Mehta (head of physical production at 20th Century Studios), Fiona Walsh (vp of physical production at Searchlight Pictures), Elona Tsou (svp of physical production at HBO), TV producer Shannon Goss, location manager Miranda Carnssale, Tokyo Vice producer Mao Nagakura and veteran casting director Ko Iwagami, among others.
Nicholas Simon, co-founder of Studio Muso and Indochina Productions, said the intention behind the gathering was to forge the kind of public-private dialogue that has helped Thailand introduce one of the Asia-Pacific region’s most attractive film incentive programs, paired with a robust crew and infrastructure base.
“We’ve found that our partners in government usually have the best of intentions and want to create programs that work — they’re just not in contact with industry enough to get the direct feedback they need,” Simon said. “Thanks to the hard work of the MPA, Thailand’s government film office and private efforts by companies like ours to leverage shows like The White Lotus to improve the ecosystem, Thailand has been able to put a more competitive offering in place.”
Simon added: “The goal of this gathering is to stimulate more private-public dialogue of this kind, so Japan can better leverage its strengths to attract more big shows that will help tell the country tell its story in an even bigger way.”
Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry currently runs a cash rebate program offering up to 50 percent of qualifying production costs for large-scale international film and TV projects shot in the country, with a cap of 1 billion yen (about $6.6 million) per project. Participants at the panel applauded the program but said a few adjustments would give major studios more confidence in utilizing it. The program’s funding is currently renewed on an annual basis, which creates uncertainty about its ongoing viability among film companies that tend to plan projects far in advance. The government also requires productions to apply for the program only during short quarterly application periods, which further reduces flexibility for studios.
“There are a lot of tweaks that could be made to make the program more user-friendly and reliable for foreign producers,” said Nagakura.
Miyagawa, who in addition to producing Shōgun worked on projects including Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill and Martin Scorsese’s Silence (which is set in Japan but was shot in Taiwan), noted that U.S. producers used to come to Japan only if their story absolutely required it, but she said projects like Tokyo Vice had begun to change the narrative.
“There is more interest in Japan than ever before,” she said, “but it is still challenging for big shows to set up here. We would have loved to have shot Shōgun in its home country, but Vancouver offered so many advantages that we couldn’t really match here. We needed to build huge sets, and Japan doesn’t have stages that are close to the size of what was at Mammoth Studios in Vancouver.”
“If you don’t have that infrastructure, you miss out on a lot,” agreed Álvarez, whose Alien: Romulus was shot primarily at Origo Studios in Budapest, Hungary. “On the flip side, what you do have in Japan is the soft strength of being a place people actually want to go. If I tell my wife that we’re going to Hungary again, she might not be so thrilled. But last time, she said, ‘If you can make a movie in Tokyo, I’ll take the kids there for six months, no problem!’ The civility and quality of life you have here are very appealing.”
20th Century’s Mehta noted that he was surprised by the affordability of locations and stages throughout the group’s cross-Japan tour of the preceding week.
“We used to have this idea of Japan as a very expensive place,” he said. “But my eyes were opened by how far your money can go here — and I think it’s more than just the exchange rate and the weak yen. It’s clear that if you do the hard work to figure out how to work here, you can get a lot of value on screen.”
Iwagami said he noticed how Hollywood producers’ mindsets have begun to shift toward genuine collaboration from the way U.S. producers now approach casting.
“A few years ago, when a big U.S. show would approach us, they would always want the same three or four A-list Japanese actors whom everyone in Hollywood knows and recognizes — that was the extent of their imagination for Japanese talent,” Iwagami said. “Lately, though, when they come to me, they have many more possibilities in mind. They’ve watched and loved independent Japanese films and the Japanese series that Netflix has made, and they’ve got a much better understanding of our talent base. I think this shows a shift, where we’re being treated more like real collaborators.”
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