Story Categories: advertising, Film, Japan, Toho,

TOKYO -- In a first for the Japanese exhibition biz, Shochiku will run a trailer for pic distribbed by rival Toho in its theater chain.

 The pic, "Tsubaki Sanjuro," is a remake of the 1962 Akira Kurosawa classic. Starring Yuji Oda in the Toshiro Mifune role of a masterless samurai who masterminds a victory for one side in a clan feud, the pic opens in December.

 Shochiku will run the pic's trailer during screenings of "The Blue Wolf: To the Ends of the Earth and Sea," the Genghis Khan biopic it is distribbing. Helmed by Shinichiro Sawai and starring Takashi Sorimachi as Khan, the pic opens in Shochiku theaters on March 3.

 The unusual arrangement was the brainchild of Haruki Kadokawa, the exec producer of both "Tsubaki Sanjuro" and "The Blue Wolf." "I want people who have come to see "The Blue Wolf," my latest blockbuster, to also see my next blockbuster," Kadokawa explained. In other words, two for the price of one.

 Kadokawa, who produced a long string of BO winners in the 1970s and 1980s, spent much of the 1990s fighting back from a 1993 bust for cocaine smuggling. He made a stunning comeback last year with the WW2 sea battle epic "Yamato," which earned $42 million at the domestic BO. Owning an industry-wide rep as a master showman and promoter, Kadokawa boosted "Yamato"s BO by turning the mock-up of the title battleship into a theme-park-like attraction, drawing thousands of visitors.

 In 1995 Toho and Toei agreed to screen trailers of each other's war pics, both commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of WW2, but Kadokawa is the first to persuade a major distrib to cooperate in screening the trailer of a rival company's pic with no thematic tie-in to the pic in the theater.