Hideo Kojima's latest project is a video series, "Hideo Tube," and he released the first episode today on the YouTube channel for his new studio, Kojima Productions, to go through his favorite movies of 2015.
Kojima announced the new Kojima Productions and its collaboration with Sony Computer Entertainment in mid-December, and he's spent much of the weeks since then traveling the world to meet with game developers and other creative professionals. That tour included a Jan. 13 stop at YouTube Space Tokyo, one of YouTube's regional workspaces and studios, to record the first episode of "Hideo Tube." The series appears to be a follow-up to the old "Kojima Station" broadcasts that Kojima and his team ran at the Konami-owned Kojima Productions.
Hideo Tube's 46-minute debut episode, "Top 10 Movies of 2015," features Kojima speaking with Kenji Yano of Japanese publisher Kadokawa Shoten. Yano asks if Hideo Tube is going to be a series, and Kojima responds, "That's right. I want to do regular updates here." Kojima then points out that he can't keep Hideo Tube going if nobody's watching, and asks people to subscribe to the Kojima Productions channel. It seems like the folks at YouTube Space Tokyo gave him some good tips on how to succeed as a YouTuber!
Kojima watched approximately 90 films last year — whether in theaters, at home or on a plane — while Yano says he watched about 100 in theaters. Here is Kojima's list:
- Star Wars: The Force Awakens
- Fires on the Plain
- Straight Outta Compton
- The Intern
- Shaun the Sheep Movie
- Nightcrawler
- Locke
- Kingsman: The Secret Service
- Whiplash
- Mad Max: Fury Road
At the beginning of their discussion, Kojima said he wanted to keep his and Yano's lists focused on movies that were released in 2015. Some of the films mentioned above premiered in the U.S. in 2014, like Whiplash and Locke, but didn't debut in Japan until last year. Kojima is an avowed cinephile, with a Twitter bio that says, "[70 percent] of my body is made of movies."
Unfortunately for non-Japanese speakers, the English subtitle track only runs for the first four and a half minutes. Kojima Productions is asking the community to contribute an English translation.
