As the opening credits rolled on a recent movie rental, I wondered for the umpteenth time why you see a chain a company credits, such as:
A “Universal” Globe, followed by
a “Warner Brothers” symbol, followed by something like
“Cherokee Trail Pictures production”, followed by something like
“In association with Dakota Films…”
And THEN the title.
So what’s with naming so many different companies, and is there some logical division of effort/credit/distributing/funding? Are they divisions within each other, or inter-company collaborations?
A “Universal” Globe, followed by
a “Warner Brothers” symbol, followed by something like
“Cherokee Trail Pictures production”, followed by something like
“In association with Dakota Films…”
Universal is simply distributing the finished film product - making the copies and supplying them to theaters world-wide.
Warner Brothers actually financed the film that was most likely, filmed at their studio or at least the cite of pre and post production.
Cherokee Trail Pictures is a vanity project - for instance DeNiro and Pacino got together, set up some offices and started to look for scripts that could work for the two of them.
Dakota films could be any number of sub-projects - they could be the little group of artists who go looking for scripts to sell to vanity projects.
All of these groups (especially the smaller groups) want to keep their names on the credits so they can use that to further pet projects along.
Barwood was/is Streisand’s personal production company.
All Girl Productions was/is Bette Midler’s personal production company.
Tribeca Productions is DeNiro’s?
Company A obtains the rights to a script or a piece of source material, and decides to actually produce the movie i.e. get together a bunch of money and other resources (actors, technicians, equipment) and create a finished movie which they hope will make a profit.
Company B may be involved purely to provide financial backing.
Company C actually distributes the movie to the theatres so we can all pay to go see it.
The producers, backers and distributors all want their logo and credit on the front of the movie.
Pretty much answered but there are tons of variations on the theme.
Basically anybody on God’s green earth can make a movie. But that is expensive and the clever ones form some sort of company/coporation for tax write off reasons. When a company’s name is the same or simular to the title of the picture, that is what is going on there.
Sometimes, a person (now a company) makes a movie and they trot it around to festivals and a film company comes and buys up the distribution rights to the film. (sometimes they make a few changes to the final project)
Sometimes a production company like say Lightstorm Entertainment has a title and a director and they need other people’s money to make the movie. Let us say in this case the director is James Cammeron and the film is called Titanic. He can shop that around to any ‘movie studio’ he wants. They may choose or not choose to finance and distribute the film and they may haggle with Mr. Cammeron over his artistic choices. They may say"get a star" or get rid of that downer ending and we’ll make it and James may or may not accept the deal.
So even if you see Studio presents Company’s film the studio may or may not have been involved in the artistic decisions of the making of the film. It depends at what stage of production they bought the title.