Hiro Matsuoka, the Toho heir and CEO betting Godzilla’s studio on the world

Hiro Matsuoka

Born	April 18, 1966 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Businessperson

Hiro Matsuoka likes to say that the biggest hit of his tenure was luck, and the record backs him up more than a chief executive would usually admit. His company had looked at the kabuki saga that became Kokuho, judged it too expensive and too specialised, and walked away. It ended up distributing the film anyway, after a Sony studio revived the project. That candour is a useful way into the man who runs Toho, the studio of Godzilla and of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films. He inherited a company that dominates Japanese cinemas and still earns most of its money at home. His job, as he defines it, is to make it count everywhere else.

He was born into that company in an almost literal sense. His father, Isao Matsuoka, played Davis Cup tennis for Japan before becoming Toho’s president and, later, its honorary chairman. His grandfather Tatsuo had run the studio before that, and his great-grandfather was Ichizo Kobayashi, the railway entrepreneur who founded Hankyu, the Takarazuka Revue and Toho itself. Matsuoka was born in Rome, where his father was working at Toho’s European office, and grew up in Tokyo, the middle of three children. His younger brother is Shuzo Matsuoka, the former tennis professional who became one of the most recognisable faces on Japanese television.

Born on 18 April 1966, he went through the Keio school system from its Yochisha elementary school to a law degree at Keio University in 1989, spending most of those years on a tennis court. He captained the university team and still calls the experience a failure: his brother had left for a specialist tennis school, his own commitment was half-hearted and his results were mediocre. “I think my motivation for work is the desire never to feel that way again,” he told Keio’s alumni journal this year. A primary-school teacher had once told him that, for him, the place to study was not England but America. He took the advice, studying at Albright College in Pennsylvania and completing an MBA at the University of Pittsburgh in 1992.

In 1992 he took an entry-level job at International Creative Management, the Hollywood talent agency, sorting papers and learning how American studios really make their deals. He came home two years later to join Toho-Towa, the group’s arm for distributing foreign films in Japan, and climbed it step by step: director in 1998, president in 2008, chairman in 2015. For two decades his career ran through the Hollywood-facing side of the group, while the parent company concentrated on the domestic box office.

His rise at Toho itself followed the same patient pattern. He joined the board in 2014, became a managing director in 2018 and took charge of film planning and international operations in 2021. On 26 May 2022 he became the company’s fifteenth president, succeeding Yoshishige Shimatani. By then he had already helped write the plan he would carry out. During the pandemic, he and two other directors drafted TOHO VISION 2032, a long-term strategy pegged to the company’s centenary that made animation the fourth pillar of the business and set out to raise the overseas share of revenue from about a tenth to nearly a third.

The first years of his presidency turned that plan into purchases. Toho bought the animation studio Science SARU in 2024 and, that October, GKIDS, the North American distributor known for handling Studio Ghibli’s films. It took a stake in the Los Angeles producer Fifth Season and, at the end of 2025, agreed to buy the British distributor Anime Limited to build a European base. The calling card for all of it was Godzilla Minus One. Toho released Takashi Yamazaki’s film in North America through its own subsidiary rather than a Hollywood partner, and it became the highest-grossing Japanese live-action film ever released there before winning the Oscar for visual effects in 2024. Matsuoka also served as an executive producer, on Toho’s behalf, of the Apple TV+ series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

The story Toho tells about this period deserves some scrutiny. Its record results, operating revenue of 360.63 billion yen in the year to February 2026 and a third straight year of record operating profit, owe a great deal to films that other companies made. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle came from Aniplex and Ufotable. Kokuho was produced by Sony’s Myriagon Studio after Toho had dropped it. Toho’s real edge is distribution and exhibition: Matsuoka says its TOHO Cinemas chain ranks second in Japan by screens but first by revenue. Overseas income remains a small slice of the total. There is also the question of lineage. When he was named president, the Japanese business press led with his brother and his great-grandfather. In interviews he talks less about the family tree than about the founder’s idea of what a studio is for, and he does not disown the inheritance: “We are inheriting the ideal stated by Ichizo-san to deliver healthy entertainment to the general public, and now we are trying to do that not just for Japan, but for the world.”

His public comments suggest an executive more comfortable with doubt than his job title implies. On Kokuho, which had taken 20.42 billion yen by March 2026 and become the top-grossing Japanese live-action film of all time, he said: “I feel it was truly a matter of luck, and I’m not just being humble.” On artificial intelligence, after Toho opened an internal AI office in 2025: “AI is an important tool for us, but at the same time, it is a threat.” He has also pushed the company away from the habit of “not increasing people” that took root after the film industry’s crisis of the 1970s. The current plan describes the shift as moving from a few elite to “many elite”, because the anime and overseas businesses need more people than Toho has.

He sits on the board of trustees of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and on 29 October 2026, during the Tokyo International Film Festival, he is scheduled to hold a public conversation with Bill Kramer, chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, at Tokyo Midtown Hibiya Hall. On the agenda: the global film business and the future of theatrical and streaming distribution.

The bigger test comes days later. Toho has named Godzilla Minus Zero, Yamazaki’s follow-up, its highest priority for the year. It opens in Japan on 3 November 2026, the anniversary of the original 1954 film, and in North America on 6 November through GKIDS. It is the first time a Japanese-made Godzilla film has been rolled out almost simultaneously on both sides of the Pacific, and it will show whether the plan Matsuoka helped write can make the world as dependable a market for Toho as Japan.

Tags: business, ceos, business leaders, Japanese cinema, KOKUHO, Toho, Godzilla Minus One, Hiro Matsuoka, Takashi Yamazaki