Deluxe and Tohokushinsha Team Up to Localise Film Across Asia-Pacific

Deluxe Media Inc. and Tokyo-based Tohokushinsha Film Corporation have formed a strategic partnership to expand localisation services — dubbing, subtitling, and other language work — across the Asia-Pacific region, Variety reported on 17 August 2026.

The deal is non-exclusive, meaning either company remains free to work with other partners. As part of the arrangement, Deluxe has opened a Japan office inside Tohokushinsha's Tokyo headquarters, putting its staff physically alongside one of Japan's longest-tenured localisation houses.

Deluxe traces its roots to 1915, when it began as a film processing lab in the United States. Over more than a century it grew into a full-service media firm handling localisation, distribution, and post-production — the behind-the-scenes work that turns a film shot in one language into something audiences in another country can watch and understand. The company is owned by Platinum Equity, a private equity firm, and led by CEO Cyril Drabinsky.

Tohokushinsha, founded in 1961, has spent decades as a leader in Japanese-language localisation before branching into production, broadcasting, and distribution. The company's shares trade on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's Standard Market and the Nagoya Stock Exchange's Main Market, making it one of the relatively few Japanese film-sector companies with publicly listed stock.

The partnership lands two years after Tohokushinsha faced an unsolicited push to go private. In July 2024, Singapore-based investment firm 3D Investment Partners — which holds roughly 18% of Tohokushinsha — proposed taking the company private at a purchase price of 600 to 650 yen per share, according to Deadline, Variety, and Reuters. Tohokushinsha's board of directors deemed it inappropriate to accept the proposal, Yahoo Finance reported in August 2024. The company stayed public and continued trading.

For everyday filmgoers, localisation is the invisible layer between a Hollywood release and a packed cinema in Osaka or Seoul. Every dubbed line of dialogue, every subtitled joke, and every culturally adjusted on-screen graphic passes through companies like these before reaching a screen. The Asia-Pacific market — spanning Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, and beyond — has grown into one of the world's largest ticket-revenue regions, and studios need local-language versions ready for simultaneous worldwide releases.

By placing Deluxe staff inside Tohokushinsha's headquarters, the two companies are betting that proximity and shared infrastructure will let them compete for more of that work across the region. Neither side is locked in exclusively, but each brings something the other lacks: Deluxe's global post-production footprint and Tohokushinsha's six decades of relationships in Japan.