TOKYO -- When Sony said in March that it was offloading its television business to a new joint venture with a Chinese rival, many in Japan felt a pang of nostalgia for the heyday of the country's consumer-electronics industry.

But Sony's CEO, Hiroki Totoki, is not given to sentimentality. This is true even though he has worked for the company since 1987, and is fluent in corporate lore about when color TV -- and later, the Walkman and PlayStation -- made Sony a household name.

Since taking the top job last year, Totoki has made the TV deal, brought in chip giant TSMC to collaborate on Sony's valuable image sensor and spun off Sony's financial arm -- a unit he once ran.

It is all in service of corporate reinvention: a transformation of Sony from the world's most recognizable electronics firm into an entertainment business focused on music, movies, videogames and the technology that underpins them. The latest installment of Sony's Spider-Man films pulled in more than $900 million in its opening weekend worldwide in August, making it the second-biggest movie launch ever after Disney's "Avengers: Endgame." Lionsgate's recent "Michael" biopic helped push profit at Sony's music unit to a new quarterly record as fans revisited the music of Michael Jackson, a mainstay of Sony's catalog.

"Traditional businesses are important. I have great respect for these businesses," Totoki said in an interview at Sony's Tokyo headquarters. "But at the same time, we need to change."

Sony was founded in 1946 as a radio repair shop in bombed-out Tokyo. By the 50s it was making tape recorders and transistor radios. The Walkman came out in 1979, revolutionizing how people listen to music. Sony followed that with the Handycam, the Discman and other innovative products that made "It's a Sony" synonymous with quality and cool.

In 1988, Sony bought CBS Records, home to artists including Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. It seemed like a trophy purchase for an electronics firm swimming in cash during the heady days of Japan's bubble economy.

An even bigger deal, Sony's 1989 buyout of Columbia Pictures -- for around $5 billion including debt -- would for a time be a favorite business-school example of corporate hubris. Sony wrote off most of its investment just five years later following a string of box-office flops and profligate spending, before a turnaround helped by hits like 1997 blockbuster "Men In Black."

Totoki, who joined Sony straight out of college, watched these early experiments from his humble perch as a junior treasurer in Tokyo. Would he have imagined in the late 1980s that 30 years later, Sony would be primarily an entertainment company, its consumer-electronics business a sliver of its former size?

"No, never," Totoki said. "People didn't mention the entertainment industry at all."

Today, more than two-thirds of Sony's annual revenue comes from motion pictures, music and videogames, with franchises such as Spider-Man and Jumanji. The company has made a big bet on Japanese animation known as anime, a wellspring of pop-culture hits such as "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba."

A key strategy is turning hit videogames into movies and TV shows, ensuring valuable entertainment properties keep earning. After the success of "The Last of Us," a postapocalyptic TV drama that was inspired by a videogame, Sony is working on a TV adaptation of "God of War," a videogame that follows a muscle-bound Spartan warrior in his battles with the Greek gods.

"That's the flywheel we like to make," Totoki said. He added that Sony is looking for ways to integrate gaming and anime, genres he said have a natural affinity.

Totoki, 62, grew up in Yamaguchi, a prefecture on the westernmost tip of Japan's main island famous for lush forests and noodles fried on hot tiles. He recalls a time in the early 2010s when Sony struggled to get financing, its bonds downgraded to junk status by one big ratings agency as its electronics business reeled from the introduction of Apple's iPhone in 2007, the 2008 financial crisis, and an onslaught of new competition including from South Korea's Samsung.

A CEO's most important task is simply making sure the business survives, he said, noting the challenges of the current era: trade wars and disrupted supplies of energy and chips. "Considering that importance, we need to take some action. Otherwise, we cannot survive in this landscape, " he said. Sony earnings in the April-June quarter were solid but were propped up by U.S. tariff rebates and a weak yen. Shares are down about 2.5% over the past year, reflecting rising costs for essentials such as memory chips that are affecting the broader entertainment and gaming industry.

That has also affected the rollout of the PS6, the sixth generation of Sony's PlayStation videogame console. Many analysts had expected the console to arrive next year, but those expectations have drifted further out because of the global shortage of key components caused by the ravenous demand from AI.

Totoki said the company still hasn't fixed a date for PS6's launch.

Analysts say Totoki has had an energetic start as CEO, but investors are eager to know what comes next. There is excitement about the coming release of the sixth installment of the wildly-popular "Grand Theft Auto" videogame series, slated for November, as well as Sony's opportunity in so-called physical AI, which encompasses robots as well as wearable devices being developed by OpenAI and others.

AI also could pose challenges to the company's entertainment wing. A recent survey by music streamer Deezer found almost 30% of tracks uploaded to its platform were AI-generated, and that 97% of its listeners couldn't tell the difference between AI-generated music and music made by humans. New AI models can create realistic videos from scratch, highlighting another threat to creative industries.

Totoki, an Oasis superfan, said people will still hunger for music, games and movies created by humans, even if AI helps in the process: A recent Sony investor presentation highlighted the use of AI to animate characters' hair in videogames, a laborious process for human animators.

"AI cannot replace it. AI can enhance human creativity," Totoki said. "It is really up to us. We take advantage of AI, or we face a threat from AI."