His goal was to try to reap synergy benefits by creating film adaptations of the publishing house's most popular books and marketing them simultaneously.

[2] The company's first film was the 1976 release The Inugamis, directed by Kon Ichikawa and adapted from a Kadokawa Shoten published novel written by Seishi Yokomizo.

[3] Due to an aggressive marketing campaign, the film ended as the second-largest earner of the year in Japan.

The company's pictures were usually large-scale epics with sizable budgets and matching advertising campaigns, aimed for mass audiences and box-office success.

Its biggest failure came in 1992, when the 25 million US$ film Ruby Cairo, starring Andie MacDowell, failed to find a distributor in the United States.