The Japanese Market for UK Films - BFI

1-3 Art House Theatres in Tokyo
In most cases, Art house theatres in Japan have a relatively small number of
seats and are therefore known as "mini theatres". Mini theatres can be seen all
across Tokyo Metropolitan area, including Ginza, Shibuya, and Shinjuku districts.
In the recent years, however, they tend to be concentrated particularly in the
Shibuya area where new theatres are continuously being built. Up to the 1990’s,
most mini theatres showed mainly foreign movies such as French movies but
this has changed recently. Korean movies were shown during the Korean boom
years and in the last 2 to 3 years Japanese domestic movies have been shown
in mini theatres as well.
The majority of these theatres are run independently and do not belong to any of
the major distributing companies such as Toho and Toei. A new method known
as “Expanded Release” is developing around these mini theatres, in which
distributing companies add multiplexes in urban areas to the mini theatres to
secure a total of 50 to 200 screens. The reason behind this trend is the increase
in the purchase price of foreign movies. That is, in order to recoup the high
purchase price, companies invest in large advertising budgets to create
secondary and tertiary usage through video packages and television. These
usages are the source of their profits.
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