Tokyo Vice Producer Criticizes Japan's Subjective Film Incentive

Japan is moving to unify its fragmented film industry support under a single government body, a shift that comes as top producers call for clearer rules and automatic approvals for the country’s production incentive.

The change was discussed at the Motion Picture Association’s annual seminar during the Tokyo International Film Festival. Alex Boden, the London-based producer behind HBO Max’s “Tokyo Vice,” and Deb Richards, Netflix’s production policy director, led the push for reform. They spoke while the government prepared a new entity to consolidate scattered content-industry support.

Boden traced the incentive’s history from a 2020 research program to the current IP360 scheme, which offers a 50% rebate on Japanese spend. He noted that the minimum spend requirement was recently raised to 800 million yen, or $5.1 million. This threshold, he argued, excludes independent films and co-productions. Most domestic Japanese films cost between $1.5 million and $3 million.

The producer criticized the panel-based selection method, describing Japan as one of the few territories with a subjective incentive. He argued that projects often take three to five years to develop, making uncertainty a major risk. “So how does a producer know that they can count on the Japan incentive in advance? That’s the question, and we need a solution,” Boden said. He cited Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” “Pachinko,” and “Shōgun” as examples of Japan-set projects that scouted locally but filmed elsewhere.

Richards agreed that clarity was missing. She stated that applicants often could not determine why they were rejected without comparing their proposals to approved ones. She called the process “opaque” and emphasized that certainty in criteria is more important than the size of the rebate.

Paul Muller, the MPA’s VP of production policy for Asia-Pacific, offered international comparisons. He pointed to Australia, where international productions must spend at least 20 million Australian dollars ($13.9 million) and allocate 1% of their budget to training. Since that rule began in June 2023, over 20 million Australian dollars has funded training. The average cost of an hour of Australian television has also risen from 2 million Australian dollars to between 5 million and 6 million Australian dollars over the past decade.

Muller welcomed signs that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is moving toward two-year financing and higher maximum thresholds. Georgina Pope, head of production at Toho Tombo Pictures, added that permitting in Tokyo is becoming more flexible. Her team recently closed the road in front of Tokyo City Hall for a car scene. “I’m finding that Japan is really starting to realize the value of having a dynamic international film industry,” Pope said.

On the government side, Hirohiko Nakahara, director-general of the Cabinet Office’s Intellectual Property Strategy Promotion Secretariat, revealed that a task force for the new entity held its first meeting on Oct. 22. The body, ordered directly by the Prime Minister, aims to break down silos between the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the Agency for Cultural Affairs, METI, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The government targets a launch in 2027.

This consolidation is part of a public-private roadmap from July that targets 20 trillion yen ($127 billion) in overseas sales by 2033. Content is one of 17 strategic fields in the administration’s growth plan. Former METI minister Akira Amari, who chaired the parliamentary league behind Japan’s basic content law 22 years ago, said the new approach uses multiplication rather than addition. He described the 2033 target as a plan to quadruple the industry in 10 years.

Muller concluded that if the government delivers on the discussed changes, the 20 trillion yen goal is achievable. The new festival director, Takeo Hisamatsu, noted that Japan was the country of honor at Cannes and that 37 Japanese films screened at the Busan International Film Festival.