Toho Company, Ltd.

Toho Company, Ltd. (東宝株式会社. Tōhō Kabushiki-Kaisha) is a Japanese film studio. It is headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, and is one of the core companies of the Hankyu Hanshin Toho Group. In the West, it is best known as the producer of many kaiju and tokusatsu movies, the films of Akira Kurosawa, and the anime films of Studio Ghibli, as well as the Pokémon movies.

The company's most famous creation, the Godzilla franchise, was created by Tomoyuki Tanaka.

It’s one of Japan's four major film studios.

History

Toho was founded by the Hankyu Railway in 1932 as the Tokyo-Takarazuka Theater Company by industrialist Ichizō Kobayashi. It managed much of the kabuki in Tokyo and, among other properties, the Tokyo Takarazuka Theater and the Imperial Garden Theater in Tokyo; Toho and Shochiku enjoyed a duopoly over theaters in Tokyo for many years. After several successful film exports to the United States during the 1950s, Toho opened the La Brea Theatre in Los Angeles to show its own films without selling to a distributor. It was known as the Toho Theatre from the late 1960s until the 1970s. Toho also had a theater in San Francisco and opened a theater in New York in 1963.

The Shintoho Company was so named "New Toho" because it broke off from Toho.

They have contributed to the production of some American films, including Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan.