Orion Pictures
Orion Releasing, LLC (doing business as Orion Pictures) is an American film production and distribution company owned by the Amazon MGM Studios subsidiary of Amazon. In its original operating period (then-known as Orion Pictures Corporation), the company produced and released films from 1978 until 1999 and was also involved in television production and syndication throughout the 1980s until the early 1990s. It was formed in 1978 as a joint venture between Warner Bros. and three former senior executives at United Artists. From its founding until its buyout by MGM in the late 1990s, Orion was considered one of the largest mini-major studios.[3]
Orion Pictures
January 1978 (original; as Orion Pictures Corporation)
2013 (relaunch; as Orion Releasing, LLC)
- Arthur B. Krim
- Eric Pleskow
- Mike Medavoy
- William Bernstein
- Robert Benjamin
1999 (original)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Worldwide
- Alana Mayo (president)[1][2]
- John Bryan
- (president, MGM Domestic TV Distribution)
- Metromedia (1988–1997)
- Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
- (1997–2023)
- Amazon MGM Studios
- (2023–present)
Orion Classics
Woody Allen, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, Oliver Stone, and several other prominent directors worked with Orion during its most successful years from 1978 to 1992. Of the films distributed by Orion, four won Academy Awards for Best Picture: Amadeus (1984), Platoon (1986), Dances with Wolves (1990), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991).[4] Four other Orion films, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Mississippi Burning (1988), Women Talking (2022) and American Fiction (2023), were nominated for the aforementioned category.
Since 1997, Orion has been owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). In 2013, MGM revived the Orion name for television; a year later, Orion Pictures was relaunched by the studio.
History
1978–1981: Beginnings
In January 1978, three executives of Transamerica (TA)-owned studio United Artists (UA)—Arthur B. Krim (chairman), Eric Pleskow (president and chief executive officer), and Robert Benjamin (chairman of the finance committee)—quit their jobs. Krim and Benjamin had headed UA since 1951 and subsequently turned around the then-flailing studio with a number of critical and commercial successes. Change had begun once Transamerica purchased UA in 1967 and, within a decade, a rift formed between Krim and Transamerica chairman John R. Beckett concerning the studio's operations. Krim suggested spinning off United Artists into a separate company which was rejected by Beckett.[5]
The last straw came for Pleskow when he refused to collect and deliver the medical records of UA department heads to Transamerica's offices in San Francisco for the sake of confidentiality. The tensions only worsened when Fortune magazine reported an article on the clash between UA and TA in which Beckett had stated that, if the executives disliked the parent company's treatment of them, they should resign.[5] Krim, Benjamin and Pleskow quit United Artists on January 13, 1978, followed by the exits of senior vice presidents William Bernstein and Mike Medavoy three days later. The week following the resignations, according to the website Reference for Business, 63 important Hollywood figures took out an advertisement in a trade paper warning Transamerica that it had made a fatal mistake in letting the five men leave. The 'fatal mistake' came true following the box-office disaster of Heaven's Gate[6] in 1980 which led to Transamerica selling UA to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.[7]
In February 1978, the five men forged a deal with Warner Bros. The executives formed Orion Pictures Company, named after the constellation which they claimed had five main stars (it actually has seven or eight). The new company intended only to finance projects, giving the filmmakers complete creative autonomy; this ideal had been successfully implemented at United Artists. Orion held a $100 million line of credit and its films would be distributed by the Warner Bros. studio. Orion, however, was contractually given free rein over distribution and advertising as well as the number and type of films the executives chose to invest in.[8]
In late March 1978, Orion signed its first contract, a two-picture deal with John Travolta's production company. Contracts with actress and director Barbra Streisand; actors James Caan, Jane Fonda, Peter Sellers, Jon Voight, and Burt Reynolds; directors Francis Ford Coppola and Blake Edwards; writer/director John Milius; singer Peter Frampton; and producer Ray Stark soon materialized.[6][9] Orion also developed a co-financing and distribution deal with EMI Films.[6] In its first year, Orion had fifteen films in production and had a dozen more actors, directors and producers lining up to sign with them.[6]
In October 1979, Benjamin died.[10] Orion's first film, A Little Romance,[11] was released in April that year. Later that year, Orion released Blake Edwards' 10 which became a commercial success, the first for Edwards in over a decade (aside from installments of The Pink Panther franchise). Other films released by Orion over the next two years included a few successes such as Caddyshack (1980) and Arthur (1981); critically praised but underperforming films such as The Great Santini (1979), an adaptation of a Pat Conroy novel, and Sidney Lumet's Prince of the City (1981); and pictures by young writer-directors such as Philip Kaufman's The Wanderers (1979) and Nicholas Meyer's debut Time After Time (1979); plus Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) which Orion only distributed in the United States. Out of the 23 films Orion released between April 1979 and December 1981, only a third of them made a profit.[12] Orion executives were conflicted over financing big-budgeted films and passed on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) for that reason.[13]
1982–1986: Split from Warner Bros.
By early 1982, Orion had severed its distribution ties with Warner Bros. As part of the deal, the rights to Orion's films made up to that point were sold to Warner Bros. Orion was now looking to have its own distribution network by acquiring another company with such capabilities. The four partners looked into Allied Artists and Embassy Pictures[14] before settling on Filmways.[15] Orion subsequently purchased Filmways and reorganized the flailing company. New employees were hired and all of Filmways' non-entertainment assets (Grosset & Dunlap and Broadcast Electronics) were sold off.[6][15]
Another result of the merger was that Orion entered television production. Orion's biggest TV hit was Cagney & Lacey which lasted seven seasons on CBS. In 1983, Orion Pictures introduced art-house division Orion Classics with executives who had previously run United Artists Classics.[15][16]
Out of the initial 18 films released by the firm under the name of Orion Pictures Corporation, ten made profits, five just managed to cover their costs, and three suffered losses under $2 million.[6] One such film, Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club, was mired in legal troubles and Orion lost $3 million of its investment.[6] "We've had some singles and doubles [but haven't] had any home runs," lamented Krim.[6] In September 1984, Orion distributed Amadeus, which garnered many accolades, winning eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.[6] That year, on April 3, 1984, Orion Pictures launched Orion Entertainment Group, that would consist of four groups, Orion Television, Orion Home Video, Orion Pay Television and Orion Television Syndication, and the new organization would produce and distribute product for television, home video, pay and syndicated markets, with Jamie Kellner serving as president.[17] On October 26, 1984, the company released the James Cameron-directed science fiction film The Terminator which was well received by critics and audience and led to a franchise involving five further films. However, Orion distributed none of the follow-ups.
For Orion, 1985 was a dismal year. All but two films, Desperately Seeking Susan and Code of Silence, made less than $10 million at the United States box office, including an unsuccessful attempt at a James Bond-type franchise, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins.[6] Orion's haphazard distribution channels and unsuccessful advertising campaigns made it impossible to achieve a hit. Another factor was that Orion was about to venture into the video business and stopped selling home-use rights to its films. Furthermore, the production of the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School was put on hold when a co-producer died, taking the film off of its Christmas 1985 release slate.[18]
In January 1986, Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna, producers of the Rambo films (the first film, First Blood, was distributed by Orion) attempted to buy $55 million worth of the studio's stock through the duo's company, Anabasis. Had they succeeded, Kassar and Vajna would have controlled the board and laid off every executive save for Krim.[18] Warburg Pincus subsequently limited its 20% stake in Orion to 5%; the remaining stock was acquired by Viacom International.[6] Viacom hoped to use Orion's product for its pay-TV channel Showtime.[19] Orion expanded into home video distribution with the formation of Orion Home Entertainment Corporation in 1985,[20] which began distributing videos under the Orion Home Video label in 1987 (before OHV's formation, HBO Video and their predecessors, as well as Vestron Video and Embassy Home Entertainment, had been responsible for home media releases of Orion product).[6]
1986–1991: Metromedia era
On May 22, 1986, Metromedia, a television and communications company controlled by billionaire (and a friend of Krim's) John Kluge, which had just divested of its television station group to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (which would form what is now the Fox network), purchased a 6.5% stake in Orion. Kluge's investment in the company came at the right time- Back to School was a success and ultimately earned $90 million at the box office.[6] By March 1987, the studio's fortunes increased dramatically with a succession of critical and commercial hits, including Platoon (which ultimately won a Best Picture Oscar), Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, and the sports film Hoosiers. Orion's 1986 offerings totaled 18 Academy Award nominations, more than any other studio.[6] In 1987, Orion achieved further success with RoboCop and No Way Out.[6] By this time, Orion's television division had expanded into the lucrative syndicated game show market under the name Century Towers Productions, in reference to Orion's street address at the time. It produced revivals of format inherited from Heatter-Quigley Productions after the Filmways merger (as Filmways had previously acquired HQ in the late 1960s); this included The New Hollywood Squares, which ran from 1986 to 1989, and a revival of High Rollers which aired in the 1987–88 season. That year, former CBS/Fox Video executive Len White joined Orion Home Video, in order to become president and CEO of the home video division, in order to oversee home video technology, and Orion had excepted to release its first home video titles to be out in the third or fourth quarter of that year, and reported to Larry Hilford, who joined the home video division two years earlier.[21]
In January 1987, Kluge faced big competition with the arrival of Sumner Redstone. His theater chain, National Amusements, purchased 6.42 percent of the company's stock. National Amusements later acquired Viacom, increasing their Orion stake at 21%, then 26%. Soon Kluge started buying more Orion stock, leading to his and Redstone's battling it out to take over the company.[22][23] Kluge ultimately succeeded when Metromedia took over approximately 67% of Orion on May 20, 1988, effectively giving him control of the studio.[6] One analyst commented on the takeover to The Wall Street Journal: "This amount is probably so small to Kluge it doesn't matter. He probably burns that up in a weekend."[6]
In 1989, Orion suffered from a disastrous slate of films, placing themselves dead last among the larger Hollywood studios in terms of box office revenue. Among its biggest flops that year were Great Balls of Fire!, the biography of Jerry Lee Lewis starring Dennis Quaid and Winona Ryder; She-Devil, a dark comedy starring Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr; Speed Zone, an action-comedy vehicle for SCTV alumni John Candy, Joe Flaherty, and Eugene Levy; and Miloš Forman's adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses, Valmont, which competed with Dangerous Liaisons, also based on the same source material. Test screenings of the "Weird Al" Yankovic comedy UHF were so strong that Orion had high expectations for it. It flopped at first,[6] but it has since attained a strong cult following.[24] Also that year, it inked a deal with Nelson Entertainment to distribute titles on videocassette and theatrically.[25][26]
In February 1990, Orion signed a deal with Columbia Pictures Entertainment in which the much larger studio would pay Orion $175 million to distribute Orion's movies and television programs overseas. Orion had previously licensed its films to individual distributors territory by territory.[6] That same month, Mike Medavoy left Orion and became head of Tri-Star Pictures.[27]
The box-office returns for Orion's 1990 releases were just as dismal as the previous year, with such failures as The Hot Spot and State of Grace. The only bright spot that year was Kevin Costner's western epic Dances with Wolves. It won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture,[28] and grossed $400 million worldwide. A few months later, Orion garnered another winner with The Silence of the Lambs, but these two films could not make up for years of losses. Only Kluge's continued infusions of cash were enough to keep the company afloat, but soon he had enough.
1991–1995: Bankruptcy
After failing to sell Orion to businessman (and former 20th Century Fox owner) Marvin Davis (Sony, which had recently purchased Columbia Pictures, was also interested),[29] Kluge took drastic steps. First, Orion shut down production. Second, Kluge ordered the sale of several projects, such as The Addams Family (which went to Paramount, though the international rights to the film were retained by Orion), in order to accumulate much-needed cash. Finally, in the spring of 1991, Kluge's people took over the company, leading to the departure of Arthur Krim.[30] Orion's financial problems were so severe, that at the 63rd Annual Academy Awards in March 1991, host Billy Crystal made reference to the studio's debt in his opening monologue, joking that "Reversal of Fortune [is] about a woman in a coma, Awakenings [is] about a man in a coma; and Dances with Wolves [was] released by Orion, a studio in a coma."[31]
It was during this time that ABC stepped in to co-finance and assume production over many of Orion TV's shows it had in production, such as American Detective and Equal Justice. After Orion had to shut the television division down, this resulted in projects like The Chuck Woolery Show, which was planned to be produced by Orion, instead having to find new production companies (such as Group W Productions in the case of Woolery).[32] Gary Nardino, former employee of Orion Television Entertainment, moved on to producing for Lorimar Television, taking some of Orion's projects with him, including Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures on Fox, and Hearts are Wild, a co-production with Spelling Television, for CBS; talent deals Orion Television had at the time (with Thomas Carter, Robert Townsend, Paul Stajonovich, Clifton Campbell and Deborah Joy Levine) were also taken by Nardino to Lorimar.[33] On November 25, 1991, Orion sold its Hollywood Squares format rights to King World Productions after Orion closed down its television division.[34]
On December 11, 1991, Orion filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.[6] That same month, Orion was in talks with New Line Cinema, a successful independent film company, to acquire the bankrupt studio. By the following April, Orion and New Line Cinema cancelled their plans on the issue of price. Republic Pictures and the then-new Savoy Pictures also attempted to buy Orion, but no deal materialized.[35][36]
In February 1992, Bernstein, who was president and chief executive of Orion at that point, resigned from the studio, Bernstein would go on to become executive vice president at Paramount Pictures.[37][38]
At the Academy Awards ceremony, broadcast on March 30, 1992, Crystal made another reference to Orion, this time about its demise: