Hollywood Pictures was an American film production label of the The Walt Disney Studios, a division of The Walt Disney Company. Similar to Disney's Touchstone Pictures and former Miramax and Dimension film labels, it produced films for a more mature adult audience than Walt Disney Pictures.
While then-Disney chief Michael Eisner at first intended Hollywood Pictures to be a full-fledged studio, like Touchstone, in recent years its operations have been scaled back and its management has been merged with the flagship Walt Disney Pictures studio. Its most profitable film to date is The Sixth Sense, which grossed over $600 million worldwide.
The division is known for having brought M. Night Shyamalan's films to the theater.
History
Because of the success of Disney's mature film division Touchstone Pictures, yet another Disney-related film label was established as Hollywood Pictures on February 1, 1989. Ricardo Mestres was appointed the division's first president moving over from Touchstone Pictures. The division was created to create opportunities for up and coming executives and double its feature film output to fill the gap left by the contraction in the industry which includes closure of MGM/UA's United Artists and financial problems at Lorimar-Telepictures and De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. With Touchstone aligned with Disney, the two Disney Studio production divisions would share the same marketing and distribution staffs. Hollywood is expected to be producing 12 films a year by 1991 and to share funding from the Silver Screen Partners IV. The company's first release was Arachnophobia in 1990.
On October 23, 1990, The Walt Disney Company formed Touchwood Pacific Partners I to supplant the Silver Screen Partnership series as their movie studios' primary funding source.
After the collapse of their just renewed deal at Paramount Pictures, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer moved their production company to Hollywood Pictures in January 1991.
The division issued primarily inexpensive comedies for the first six years with a few box office flops films amongst them Holy Matrimony, Aspen Extreme, Super Mario Bros., Swing Kids, Blame It on the Bellboy, Born Yesterday and Guilty as Sin. The division only had one box office success, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and one critical success, The Joy Luck Club, which did not out weigh the general anemic box office record of the division. In April 1994, Mestres gave a force resignation after the lackluster performance of the division. Mestres moved to long term production deal with the studio.
In July 1994, Michael Lynton was appointed as new division president moving from Disney's Hyperion, a Disney Publishing unit. Mestres left Lynton a few potential hits Robert Redford's Quiz Show, the Sarah Jessica Parker-Antonio Banderas drama Miami Rhapsody, and Dangerous Minds, starring Michelle Pfeiffer. In 1997, Lynton left for a position at Penguin Group.
By 2001, Hollywood Pictures had produced 50 films but its operation was phased out.
After being dormant for five years, the brand was re-activated for low-budget genre films, similar to Dimension Films (once a Disney division itself, now part of The Weinstein Company) or Sony Pictures' Screen Gems (part of Columbia Pictures), News Corporation's Fox Atomic (part of Fox Searchlight Pictures) and Relativity Media's Rogue Pictures (distributed by former parent Universal Studios). The first film released by the resurrected Hollywood was the 2006 horror film Stay Alive, then Primeval and The Invisible.
Disney dissolved the label in 2007 as the company announced a focus on three core brand names, Disney, ABC and ESPN with other studio brands, Touchstone, Miramax and Pixar continuing.
Filmography
1990s
2000s
See also
- List of Walt Disney Pictures films
- List of Touchstone Pictures films
References
External links
- Hollywood Pictures at the Internet Movie Database