Why you should experience TOHO Cinemas Roppongi Hills in Tokyo, Japan.
TOHO Cinemas Roppongi Hills is a flagship multiplex where Roppongi's cultural ambition, international film culture and appetite for technological performance converge inside the entertainment complex that helped redefine the neighborhood in the twenty-first century.
Set along Keyakizaka-dori near Roppongi-dori and just steps from Mori Art Museum, the nine-screen cinema moves from the glass, steel and illuminated streets of Roppongi Hills into auditoriums ranging from compact screening rooms to the immense Screen 7, whose 20-meter-wide image dominates a steeply arranged audience. Dolby Atmos gives that flagship room a three-dimensional acoustic field while MX4D turns another auditorium into a kinetic environment of moving seats, vibration, wind, mist and synchronized physical effects, making the choice of screen fundamentally alter the character of a film. Major premieres supply the experiential payoff as stars, filmmakers and invited audiences transform the surrounding complex into a red-carpet stage before the performance contracts into darkness and the film assumes control of the room. The result is a Roppongi cinema where exhibition itself becomes theatrical, allowing screen scale, sound engineering, physical effects and premiere culture to amplify the social ceremony of seeing a film.
What you should know about TOHO Cinemas Roppongi Hills.
TOHO Cinemas Roppongi Hills is best known for opening on April 25, 2003 as Virgin Cinemas Roppongi Hills with nine screens and 2,081 seats, debuting alongside Roppongi Hills during the culmination of Minoru Mori's enormous redevelopment of the former Roppongi 6-chome district. Toho acquired Virgin Cinemas Japan from Richard Branson's Virgin Group weeks before the opening, completing the transaction on April 4 and subsequently transforming the acquired multiplex operation into the foundation of TOHO Cinemas, while the Roppongi theater became Virgin TOHO Cinemas Roppongi Hills in 2004 and adopted its present name on April 4, 2006. The cinema developed a particularly visible relationship with Japanese film culture through premieres, stage greetings and major festival screenings, while an early collaboration with Mori Art Museum ran from 2003 through 2005 and placed changing moving-image works inside the multiplex as the museum prepared to establish its own contemporary-art program above Roppongi Hills. A major 2015 renovation reduced overall capacity while rebuilding the 521-seat Screen 7 around TOHO Cinemas' 20.2-meter-wide TCX format and Dolby Atmos, followed in June by MediaMation MX4D, connecting the theater's Virgin-era origins with a new generation of proprietary large-format and multiphysical exhibition technology.
Screen 7 anchors the contemporary operation through a 20.2-by-8.4-meter image and Dolby Atmos, whose object-based architecture allows individual sounds to move spatially around and above the auditorium instead of remaining confined to conventional channel positions. MX4D pursues immersion through physical synchronization, programming seat movement alongside wind, mist, scent, vibration, strobe and other effects that convert selected films into mechanically choreographed performances. TOHO Cinemas' institutional lineage gives those technologies deeper significance because Toho itself grew from Ichizo Kobayashi's entertainment enterprises into the studio behind Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya's Godzilla, both released in 1954 and both central to Japanese cinema's international reputation. Richard Branson, Minoru Mori, Ichizo Kobayashi, Kurosawa, Honda and Tsuburaya form an unusually rich chain behind the multiplex, connecting international exhibition entrepreneurship, Tokyo urban redevelopment and one of Japan's most consequential film studios with the contemporary technologies through which its Roppongi flagship presents cinema.
How to fold TOHO Cinemas Roppongi Hills into your trip.
TOHO Cinemas Roppongi Hills works as the after-dark conclusion to a Roppongi route connecting postwar Japanese art, rebellious design experimentation and the cultural transformation that accompanied the district's twenty-first-century redevelopment.
Begin at The National Art Center, Tokyo, opened in 2007 inside Kisho Kurokawa's sweeping glass building, whose absence of a permanent collection allowed one of Japan's largest exhibition facilities to operate instead through continually changing programs and major institutional collaborations. Continue to 21_21 Design Sight, also opened in 2007 after Issey Miyake initiated the project with Tadao Ando, Naoto Fukasawa and Taku Satoh, with Ando translating Miyake's A Piece of Cloth philosophy into a largely subterranean building beneath immense folded steel roof planes. Conclude at Mori Art Museum, opened in 2003 on the 53rd floor of Mori Tower under founding director David Elliott as the cultural summit of Minoru Mori's Roppongi Hills project, placing contemporary art within the same vertical city as offices, residences, hospitality and entertainment. The progression moves from Kurokawa's exhibition architecture through Miyake and Ando's interdisciplinary design culture into Mori's fusion of contemporary art and urban development before cinema completes the sequence inside TOHO Cinemas Roppongi Hills.
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