Hollywood Pictures
Hollywood Pictures was a film studio founded in 1990 by the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, part of the Walt Disney Company. Michael Eisner created it both to increase annual feature film output and to separate creative producers David Hoberman and Ricardo Mestres, who were competing under Touchstone. Mestres was given the chairman's job at Hollywood Pictures, Hoberman that at Walt Disney Pictures and Touchstone.
The first film under this new label was 1990's Arachnophobia, the first true horror thriller from Disney Studios. Until then, Eisner and Wells shied away from the high production costs of such films. In the years that followed, Hollywood Pictures produced several films for primarily adult audiences, as well as some films aimed at teenagers. The stylistic differences between Hollywood Pictures and Touchstone were not particularly serious and could only be attributed to the chairmen of the respective studios and not to any intention on the part of the corporate management to dictate certain directions to the studios. To generalize strongly, it can be said that Hollywood Pictures generally appealed to a somewhat older audience.
But in contrast to Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures did not prove quite as successful. Alongside crowd-pleasers like The Rock and highly acclaimed films like Quiz Show, many productions failed to find a mass audience and also disappointed critics.
Because of this and the fact that the company decided to produce less movies again, Hollywood Pictures was cut back and the management was brought to Walt Disney Pictures.
Up to and including 2001, Hollywood Pictures produced 83 films, including The Sixth Sense. The studio's last film for a long time was Just Visiting - Full Throttle into the Future. But contrary to some rumors, Hollywood Pictures was not completely closed at that time. The Dimension Films production Below was released in some countries under the Hollywood Pictures logo and Stay Alive, the first new Hollywood Pictures film in five years, was released in 2006. With satisfactory success, Hollywood Pictures was to be expanded into a small, so-called genre studio, producing films that did not appeal to a large mainstream audience, but only to fans of the genre in question. Due to the low box office results of Stay Alive, they initially deviated from the plan, however, they gave Hollywood Pictures another chance by letting the Touchstone Pictures productions The Trail of Horror and The Invisible change studios. If these films proved to be successes, Hollywood Pictures could possibly be revived after all. Disney obviously didn't see this happening, however, and closed the studio in April 2007.
Source
- Article at Duckipedia
