https://gkids.com/2024/10/15/toho-to...ributor-gkids/

Toho to Acquire Award-Winning North American Animation Distributor GKIDS

GKIDS TO OPERATE AS A WHOLLY-OWNED SUBSIDIARY UNDER COMPANY
FOUNDER/CEO ERIC BECKMAN AND PRESIDENT DAVE JESTEADT

Los Angeles, California, October 15, 2024 – Japanese entertainment leader Toho Co., Ltd. announced today that it has reached an agreement to acquire a 100% equity share of GKIDS, Inc., the Academy Award-winning North American animation producer and distributor. Financial terms were not disclosed.

GKIDS, which maintains offices in New York and Los Angeles, will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Los Angeles-based Toho International. GKIDS Founder Eric Beckman will remain as CEO, and Dave Jesteadt will remain as President of the company. The two have run GKIDS together since the company first released the Academy Award-nominated film The Secret of Kells as a two-person company in 2009. Together, they have grown GKIDS into a powerful force in the U.S. animation scene, amassing an outstanding thirteen Best Animated Feature nominations at the Academy Awards, and a win last year for Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron.

Toho’s acquisition of GKIDS serves to further accelerate its “TOHO VISION 2032 TOHO Group Management Corporate Strategy,” which sets the company’s plans for growth and expansion outside of Japan, and aims to connect its Japanese and international productions, creators, and studios more directly and widely with creators and fans overseas. Toho acquired Japanese animation studio Science SARU (Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, DAN DA DAN) and also made an equity investment in Los Angeles-based production and distribution company Fifth Season (Severance, Tokyo Vice), formerly known as Endeavor Content. Through GKIDS, Toho adds an established and highly regarded North American theatrical and home entertainment distribution, marketing, and sales operation to complement the licensing, merchandising, and e-commerce operations of its Toho International banner. In turn, GKIDS will be able to tap the synergies and capabilities of the larger Toho parent group, while maintaining its distinct brand, organization, and management team.

Toho and GKIDS have worked together for many years on such hits as Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering With You, Studio TRIGGER’s Promare, Spirited Away: Live on Stage, and others. Toho is also the Japanese domestic distributor for many of the same properties handled by GKIDS in North America, including the works of Studio Ghibli, Mamoru Hosoda, Makoto Shinkai, and many more.

In December 2023, GKIDS released Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron just one week after Toho International’s release of Godzilla Minus One. Both films were run-away box office successes, with The Boy and the Heron opening at #1 and becoming GKIDS’ highest-grossing release and Studio Ghibli’s highest-grossing film in North America, and with Godzilla Minus One achieving the highest box office revenue of all Japanese live-action films in the United States and becoming the third highest-grossing foreign language film in U.S. history. The two companies shared a celebratory evening at the 96th Academy Awards this past March, when both titles took home Oscars.

Toho President and CEO Hiro Matsuoka said, “Through their hard work, vision, and integrity, GKIDS has built a unique position in the US market, which dovetails perfectly with Toho’s own strengths and strategic mission. This partnership accelerates Toho’s goals to prioritize animation, develop international markets, and support IP creation, while bringing exceptional Japanese and animated content to global audiences. We are honored to be working together with Eric, Dave and the entire GKIDS team and welcoming them into the Toho family.”

“For all GKIDS’ filmmakers, content partners, distribution partners, and especially the fans, this is truly great news,” said Beckman and Jesteadt. “GKIDS will continue to operate as we always have – with the same team, the same passion, and the same mission – but now with the backing of a highly complementary and legendary parent company. We are truly thrilled to be joining forces with the esteemed and storied Toho, home to Godzilla and Akira Kurosawa, as well as blockbuster anime franchises like My Hero Academia and Jujutsu Kaisen. This partnership will empower us to bring even more amazing films to North American and global audiences, while we continue to champion animation as a cinematic artform and push the limits of what the medium is capable of. We could not be more excited about the opportunities in front of us. The best is yet to come.”

Nomura Securities Co., Ltd. acted as exclusive financial advisor to Toho, and Nishimura & Asahi (Gaikokuho Kyodo Jigyo) acting as legal advisor. ACF Investment Bank acted as exclusive financial advisor to GKIDS with Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP acting as legal advisor.

That was definitely not news I was expecting to hear today! It sounds like Toho is buying GKIDS for their strengths and hopefully won't muck up the good thing they have going.

Now I'm curious what current Gkids licenses have nothing to do with Toho...

My initial reaction is "Too little too late." I'm not sure why, but I think it's my past experience with corporate Japan and knowledge of some of their blunders in dealing with the overseas market that makes me skeptical. Also, the success of BOY AND A HERON and GODZILLA MINUS ONE were based on the popularity of Miyazaki and Godzilla. Hard to duplicate that with other Toho properties. However, once upon a time Toho actually had some consistent success in the American market with various samurai films and Godzilla and other sci-fi films in the 1950s and 1960s and Godzilla films even into the '70s although with increasingly smaller distributors after AIP stopped distributing Toho films. But things went south after that and few Toho films got much of a release in the U.S. after that. I'll have to look up my notes on this. I've written about it in the past.

Many of the recent and upcoming releases does have involvement with Toho. Science SARU (animation studio) was also acquired by Toho on May 23.


ongoing streaming simulcast on Crunchyroll, Hulu, Netflix (GKIDS only have theatrical and home entertainment rights)
- DAN DA DAN (MBS / Science SARU)


recent theatrical release:
- LOOK BACK (Avex Pictures) | this performed very well in theatrical limited release (LINK)


To be released in theaters:
- November 15 (limited release) | Ghost Cat Anzu (Shin-Ei Animation, but Toho is part of the production committee)
- January 24 (wide release) The Colors Within (Produced by STORY inc. • Production, Produced by Science SARU)
- Angel's Egg (Gebeka International)
- Summer Wars / The Boy and the Beast / The Girl Who Leapt Through Time / Wolf Children [licenses rescue]
- MFINDA


additional notes:
- Arcane: League of Legends Season 1 released on 4K UHD, BD (Riot Games)
- 2 of the French animation titles didn't get BD release (only theatrical and digital): Chicken for Linda and Sirocco and the Kingdom of Winds. Mars Express was released on BD.

I am curious what happens to something like Dandadan's dub, since there are more than one... do both get to be on the physical release?

And anything that gets their stuff out here quicker, even if it's not as big of a hit as -1, is fine with me.

MBS (Japan) commissioned the dub. That's the reason it's streaming in multiple platforms like Crunchyroll, Hulu, and Netflix.

EDIT: it looks like it's doing well on Netflix as well https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10/...eek=2024-10-13

http://4NN.cx/.216783

TOHO Acquires 6% Stake in Makoto Shinkai's Studio CoMix Wave Films

Japanese entertainment company TOHO announced on Tuesday that it has acquired 45 shares, or 6.09%, of stock in the anime management, production, and distribution company CoMix Wave Films. The investment is intended to elevate the studio's working environment in order to raise the quality of their works and increase the studio's creative opportunities.

I wonder if GKIDS abandons European animation releases.

I don't think Toho will be interested in European animation releases. Two of the French animation films (Chicken for Linda & Sirocco and the Kingdom of Winds) didn't get released on BD (theatrical and digital only). The closest may be a co-production like the upcoming film Ghost Cat Anzu (Japan & France).

I think you may be correct. A shame since no other label will likely touch some of those niche animated French films in the States.

Maybe they'll do the recent Godzilla anime stuff, hopefully Netflix didn't lock down the distribution rights too tightly.

https://www.vulture.com/article/gkid...streaming.html (February 20)

Fighting the Streaming Wars With Prestige Cartoons

Around this time last year, boutique animation distributor GKIDS was riding an Oscars high. Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, a Studio Ghibli title that GKIDS shepherded onto the U.S. market, capped off a killer theatrical and awards run by becoming only the second hand-drawn film to win Best Animated Feature (the first being Miyazaki’s Spirited Away). This year, GKIDS is sitting the Academy Awards season out, though not for lack of trying. “Even though it strikes some piece of competitive spirit within me,” president Dave Jesteadt says, “one of the exciting things for me this year is the nominations and the success for Flow and for Memoir of a Snail. Those are two films that I would’ve loved to have.”

Jesteadt says he’s comfortable no longer being the only player in the indie animation distribution game, likely because GKIDS has maintained its reputation as the prestige cartoon distributor since he co-founded the company with CEO Eric Beckman in 2008. GKIDS has built a small theatrical and licensing empire competitive with the likes of DreamWorks and Disney, often bringing films from Japan, France, Belgium, Ireland, or Spain to the U.S., notching acclaim (My Life As a Zucchini, Buńuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles, and Wolfwalkers were all award-winning GKIDS titles before The Boy and the Heron) and spreading across SVOD services. In October 2024, Jesteadt and Beckman announced they would sell the company to the Japanese entertainment giant Toho (whose most famous property is Godzilla), signalling a new era for GKIDS supremacy and prompting animation fans to worry that GKIDS’s international mission would focus too heavily on Japanese animation.

Jesteadt assures me that’s not the case, even as he touches on the company’s evolving global strategy and the challenges it faces. “Really experimental” is how he characterizes GKIDS’s first year in the wake of the Toho acquisition. That will mean restorations of classic animated films, a renewed focus on TV series, and, next week, a theatrical release of the latest title in the massively moneymaking Gundam franchise. He’s almost positive GKIDS would never make its own niche streaming service, though. Almost.

Your films are spread across every major streaming service: the Ghibli library at Max, Wolfwalkers on Apple TV+, more recently Look Back on Prime, and others on Netflix. You’ve found a lot of success without owning your own streaming platform like competitors Crunchyroll or Sentai’s HiDive do. What are your streaming and licensing ambitions going forward?

Increasingly, we are having to be nimble in terms of the exact philosophy we take for each film and what rights are available or not. At the end of the day, it’s really about just trying to get the films seen. So there’s a couple of different ways we interact with streaming services. We’re executive producers on Wolfwalkers, which was a streaming original for Apple with Cartoon Saloon. We’ve also handled the Studio Ghibli library sale to Max in the U.S. We also act as a distributor for titles that have already had global streaming deals in place, and so then we serve as distributors for theatrical or for home video or other rights; Look Back would be an example of that. That was a sale that originated in Japan. That’s just such a beautiful and sort of remarkably emotional movie that needs to be seen with an audience, so we felt strongly that there should be an opportunity for that. Obviously for a younger audience, streaming plays a hugely important role: Streaming and digital are where these films have the majority of their life cycles these days.

You’re competing against some of these other services for licenses. What bumps on the road do you run into day-to-day?

One of the biggest challenges we’re still finding our way around is just the fact that for our history, we’ve been an American or North American distributor. We started the company and came of age at a time when it was very, very typical for independent distributors to split up rights across the globe. You had your big global studio pictures, and then you had your independent films that went through sort of the festival circuit, and they got split up among several dozen different distributors in each territory that handled these types of films and specialized in them with streamers.

Now everything is back to being globalized, so streamers are de facto studios. Films that 10, 15 years ago would’ve almost certainly gone through this more independent route having specialist distributors in each territory are now like, “Hey, look, we have a global deal. You might be America, you might be a big, big territory and vital to the success of a film, but you’re also part of this global package.” We increasingly have to find ways for us to get involved at a global level, even though much of our release strategy and our interest is the local market.

Did your desire to get involved at a global level play into the Toho acquisition?

Yeah. Definitely. There’s pluses and minuses for everything in terms of the way that filmmakers get their film seen and the way that these streamers operate. But I think that ultimately, looking down a few years into the future, it’s pretty obvious that this is only going to get more and more globalized, not less. We wanted to find a partner that we felt like could help support us in those global ambitions.

Before that purchase, you had something in common with Toho. The wait to stream both your 2024 Oscars movies — Toho’s Godzilla Minus One and GKIDS’s The Boy and the Heron — in the U.S. was very long. What were the reasons?

Yeah, Godzilla has some specifics to it that I think are unique to that franchise, but ultimately, both films come from Japan. This is something that we run into quite a bit. Japan has very specific holdback structures for their content that are just different from America’s. In Japan, the theatrical release is still very dominant. Toho also owns one of the most powerful and largest exhibition chains in the country, and so they’re very heavily invested in the theatrical space and exhibition.

And Japanese films, especially when they’re successful, tend to have windows that are more like six months or up to a year for a blockbuster film. They just keep playing in theaters. Compare that to America: Post-COVID, especially, that window is getting shorter and shorter. So 18 days, 30 days, 60 days. I’m used to saying, “Okay, I know this one was opening in theaters. I know it’ll be available for premium video-on-demand rental within a couple of weeks, and then it’ll be on streaming in probably a month or two.” And that’s just not the case for Japanese films, especially big popular anime films.

So we sort of have to operate on this different timetable, and it can be a little frustrating. Do you delay the theatrical release long after the Japanese release so that you can give domestic audiences what appears to be a normal-looking timeline to them, or do you try to rush the film out in theaters so that fans here can enjoy something at the same time as fans in Japan or other countries? Often, you sort of split the difference. It’s definitely something where I think that the Hollywood studio push on the windows is unique within the global industry.

How will your new subsidiary relationship to Toho affect your future licensing and streaming partnerships? Will they be more involved in conversations around what titles go where?

For the time being, it’s going to be very similar. We continue to work really well with a lot of partners. We’ve been thoroughly disabused of the notion that consumers want another streaming service. For us, it’s really a question of the available services — we work with pretty much all of them — and how their day-to-day or month-to-month strategies can change. We’re now as responsive to the programming needs of the buyers as much as imperatives from our side. It’s often a game of catch-up — keeping in contact with the different services and hearing from programmers things like, “Oh, now we’re all in on this genre,” or “Now I need to understand what this kind of catalogue looks like in a couple of weeks before we change again.”

Everything is so fast-moving in the third-party licensing space because it’s become hollowed out in a way. All the streamers are now so focused on originals that library licensing and third-party licensing in general have become more challenging, except for the winner-takes-all model where it’s the big films that do well in theaters that have a proven audience, proven fan demand. Those are obviously going to have their pick of potential streaming partners. Our job is to try to cultivate those relationships so that all of our titles, big and small, can find a home.

In a 2017 interview, you said that GKIDS was unlikely to make serious plays into TV. Since then, you’ve had a string of classic anime license rescues — Neon Genesis Evangelion, Miyazaki’s Future Boy Conan, Nadia and the Secret of Blue Water, and the much more recent show Arcane. Now your strategy is to preview shows like Dan Da Dan and the new Gundam show Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX as theatrical compilation films. What changed? Are you getting more aggressive in TV?

I guess that’s a lesson in terms of not ruling anything out in the future …

Not intended as a gotcha!

No, not at all. That was a case of sometimes it’s hard to imagine what your role can be until someone comes with an idea. Earlier, I wouldn’t have called it an aversion to TV, but it just seemed less likely because we didn’t own a network. We didn’t own a streaming platform, and so there were limited ways that we could be involved. Since then, a couple of things have happened. With the general exit from the home-video space and physical media, a lot of studios created an opening for rescuing and curating what I think of as some of the most important series of all time. That’s good business for us. Those are great titles for our library and also really important to us as fans ourselves. People who work at the company are all really motivated by that.

And then over the last couple of years as it’s become clear that the volume of production and release is staggering, and ultimately there is a role for marketing and curation and audience development that a lot of times these series desperately need — especially when they’re launching — in order to find enough fans to get them on their way. That was a really exciting idea that we tried last year for the first time with the Dan Da Dan season-one premiere — a highly anticipated Shonen Jump anime adaptation from a manga that I love and from a studio, Science Saru, that we’ve worked on many feature films together. We knew the creative team, knew the property, knew that it was going to be something really excellent, and we wanted to experiment with how we could help launch something that was ultimately on multiple streaming platforms. They were going nonexclusive, and so that was a really interesting opportunity because there wouldn’t be one platform that owns that brand. You have the ability to find an audience across multiple channels.

Are you looking to use the resources of Toho to get your own streaming platform one day?

No, I mean, it’s hard to imagine. There’s “never say never,” but that one’s one I would almost say never on. There’s really just so many markets. The platforms that exist are run by some of the largest entertainment companies on earth, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve also succeeded in finding audiences. I suppose there’s still plenty of interesting things that’ll happen over the next couple of years in terms of the expected merging, consolidating. We just have to kind of wait and see what that process looks like. But I believe that, certainly from the audience side, it doesn’t seem like the audience, our fans or anyone, is crying out for another niche service they have to subscribe to.

Does it get messy when you want to put a compilation film of a given anime’s episode in theaters while another licensor has the series streaming rights and is trying to figure out their own strategy around that?

Yeah. Ultimately, we work with the licensor, with the producers and the studio, and they work with the streaming partners as well. It’s a heavily negotiated experience to be able to present episodes of a series before they’ve released, but at the end of the day, I think it’s a huge net positive for the streaming release. The amount of people who see it in the theater, those are your core fans who are so excited that they want to see something early, that they want to see it in a large format like a theater, and to be able to experience that together as an audience. It plays the same role that anime conventions have played for years in terms of building buzz. So I view it as an incredible additive experience for streaming, and not competition at all. It really just ensures that for a couple of weeks, there’s a lot of positive energy around a series before it releases. I think that any series that we would be involved in has to be high enough quality that you’re going to come out of that screening excited. There’s no negative word of mouth that could come out of this, or else it wouldn’t be a candidate for a theatrical proposal like that.

Your immediate upcoming releases are all in the anime space, but your roots are also in independent, international animation at large. I’ve seen fears, especially after the Toho acquisition, that animation from places like France or Belgium or Ireland or Spain or China — that these other countries won’t be prioritized as much. How do you respond to that anxiety?

Generally speaking, European films, independent animation, non-anime, remain a really important part of our business and part of our mission. That’s true for Toho as well. As the animation business gets increasingly globalized, a lot of these boundaries are starting to shift. We had a film last year, Ghost Cat Anzu, which we helped executive-produce and was a Japanese-French co-production. There’s a lot of exchange of animation talent, especially as Japan hits various production crunches. But even beyond that, Europe remains really important, and Latin America and China. All these countries and markets have vital filmmaking happening inside them, so we want to continue to champion that.

One of the exciting things for me this year — even though it strikes some piece of competitive spirit within me — is the nominations and the success for Flow and for Memoir of a Snail. Those are two films that I would’ve loved to have. In the scheme of things, it’s actually really healthy that we have competitors take on titles. The more we are a niche unto ourselves, the less healthy the industry is, and so the more that theaters and studios can sort of see the success that they can also have with these beautiful animated films, the better it is for all of us. That really helps grow the market in exciting ways.

Did you try to license Flow or Memoir of a Snail? Did you pitch for them?

Uhhhh. You know, it’s complicated. [Laughs.] We’re used to competing for a number of titles now. It used to be for years when we started that we would wait a couple of weeks after a film festival ended, and if a film hadn’t sold yet, we would offer a very modest guarantee and take that on. That’s how we built the company for the first few years, because these titles were just, frankly, undervalued in America, and someone had to prove that they were worth something. As that audience has grown, as the market has matured, it’s a great thing to see A24 with Marcel the Shell and Sideshow with Flow and IFC with Memoir of a Snail. These are all really great things. As opposed to: The more we act as the animation distributor, I think, the more it sort of reinforces some ideas that animation is just one thing when, in fact, it should be a healthy part of any studio’s portfolio of titles. There should be no reason that we’re the sole company chasing any of these films. And we’re not, definitely not anymore.

What does the future of the international animation space look like to you? Here in the States, Miyazaki’s Oscar win felt massive. Flow feels like it’s having its own moment. What comes next?

We have a real opportunity over the next couple of years with a new generation of audience that is more willing to take animation seriously. We started our Los Angeles film festival Animation Is Film as a declarative statement several years ago. In some ways, that has a defensive tone to it; you have to defend the idea of animation as film. But the younger audience has shown that they’re really open to animation of all types and all stories. That’s really, really exciting, and you start to see now a lot of animators and filmmakers who are also inspired by the older generation to create really exciting films.

So it feels really positive. I obviously have concerns over the production ecology of the world at large. It’s not great. Generative AI obviously is a big thing that hits animation and illustration pretty hard. There’s a lot of doom and gloom out there. But I have to put that aside and think that for me, some of the most exciting work I’ve seen has been all created in the last couple of years. I really think that if we can support these artists, that we have a new golden age coming up, just around the horizon.​

https://www.thewrap.com/annecy-gkids...-acquisitions/

GKids Celebrates Its Most Ambitious Annecy Yet, With 4 Acquisition Titles and 3 Films in Competition | Exclusive

There is also the 4K restoration of cult classic “Angel’s Egg”

GKIDS, a global leader in acquiring and maintaining one of the greatest, most acclaimed animation libraries, had a banner year at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. The company acquired four films out of the festival – “All You Need Is Kill,” “Another World,” “Chao” and “Little Amélie or the Character of Rain.” This is on top of films that were presented at the festival that were co-produced by GKIDS, “100 Meters,” “Allah Is Not Obliged” and “Sunny.” There was also a 4K restoration of cult classic “Angel’s Egg” from 1985, written and directed by Mamoru Oshii.

The collected titles are “a testament to the company’s unyielding commitment to the animated art form,” according to an official release.

“As GKIDS has evolved, our mission has remained the same: to champion the best animation from around the world from the most exciting talent. We’re proud to have that mission illustrated at this year’s Annecy,” said Rodney Uhler, GKIDS’ Director of Acquisitions and Development, in a Friday statement. “While these films are each unique works of art, they give us hope that the broader animation landscape is as vibrant as ever. A GKIDS film is an intimate, emotional French gem, an action-packed, futuristic epic from Japan, an imaginative world from emerging talent in Hong Kong and everything in between. We’re thrilled these titles can be showcased at this festival and look forward to bringing them to audiences in the future.”

The scope of projects is what is truly amazing – everything from the gently surreal drama of “Little Amélie or the Character of Rain” to sports drama “100 Meters” to the post-apocalyptic alien invasion of “All You Need Is Kill,” and everything in between. Then there’s “Angel’s Egg,” from the creator of “Ghost in the Shell,” which is being restored 40 years after its initial release. Also, “Chao” is set in “a futuristic world where humans and mermaids coexist,” so think about that for a minute.

GKIDS has been responsible for recent favorites like Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning masterpiece “The Boy and the Heron;” “Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time,” the fourth and final film in the incredible “Rebuild of Evangelion” film series; and Naoko Yamada’s “The Colors Within.” Upcoming films include a re-release of live-action “Godzilla” film “Shin Godzilla,” from “Neon Genesis Evangelion” creator Hideaki Anno and much more.

- https://news.animenomics.com/p/gkids...ons-under-toho

GKIDS to invest in more North American co-productions

New York-based anime film distributor GKIDS, which was acquired by Japanese film giant Toho last year, plans to invest in more anime co-productions in order to grow the North American anime market.

Why it matters: Toho sees North America as a key engine to its overseas expansion, and anime has become increasingly important to the film giant, becoming a “fourth pillar” of the company’s business.

What they’re saying: “The North American anime market has evolved from niche to mainstream,” GKIDS chief executive officer Eric Beckman said in an interview recently published in Toho’s annual integrated report.

• “Careful curation will be essential moving forward, and we aim to select only the works we truly believe in and deliver them to audiences,” GKIDS president Dave Jesteadt added.

Zoom in: Mfinda, an anime film drawing elements from Congolese folklore, is one co-production in which GKIDS has invested in recent years.

• Mfinda was created by Congolese American artist Patience Lekien alongside Los Angeles-based creative studio N LITE and has signed on anime producer Masao Maruyama as a producer.
• The film is animated by Tokyo-based MOCCO, a new anime studio founded by Maruyama, under the direction of veteran anime director Gisaburo Sugii with American animator Arthell Isom as co-director.

The bigger picture: GKIDS’s role as a purveyor of Japanese cinema will also expand as it prepares to distribute Kokuho, Japan’s second highest-grossing live-action film of all time.

• “We share the same international vision and complement each other’s strengths, so the partnership is ideal,” Jesteadt said of Toho. “I’m convinced we can achieve heights neither of us could reach alone.”

Disclosure: Corrections have been made to Patience Lekien’s name and the production staff roles of Mfinda. Animenomics regrets the errors.