Hollywood Pictures (film studio)
Hollywood Pictures was a film studio founded in 1990 by the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group , which is part of the Walt Disney Company . Michael Eisner created it to increase the annual film output on the one hand, and to separate the creative producers David Hoberman and Ricardo Mestres , who were competing under Touchstone , on the other . Mestres was appointed chairman of Hollywood Pictures, Hoberman of Walt Disney Pictures and Touchstone.
The first film under this new label was Arachnophobia from 1990, the first true horror thriller from Disney Studios. So far, Eisner and Wells have shied away from the high production costs of such films. In the years that followed, Hollywood Pictures produced various films for a mainly adult audience, as well as some films for the youth target group. The stylistic differences between Hollywood Pictures and Touchstone were not particularly serious and could only be traced back to the chairpersons of the respective studios and not to an intention of the corporate management to dictate certain directions for the studios. Broadly speaking, it can be said that Hollywood Pictures generally appealed to a slightly older audience.
But in contrast to Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures was not quite as successful. In addition to top hits such as The Rock and highly acclaimed films such as Quiz Show , many productions did not find a mass audience and also disappointed the critics .
Due to this and the fact that the company decided to produce fewer films again, Hollywood Pictures was screwed back and the management was brought to Walt Disney Pictures.
Through 2001, Hollywood Pictures had produced 83 films, including The Sixth Sense . The studio's last film for a long time was Just Visiting - Into the future at full speed . But contrary to some rumors, Hollywood Pictures was not yet fully closed. The Dimension Films production Below was released in some countries under the logo of Hollywood Pictures and in 2006, Stay Alive was the first new Hollywood Pictures film to appear in five years. If the success is satisfactory, Hollywood Pictures should be expanded into a small, so-called genre studio that produces films that do not appeal to a large mainstream audience, but only fans of the respective genre. Due to the low box office income of Stay Alive, they deviated from the plan at first, but gave Hollywood Pictures a new chance by letting the Touchstone Pictures productions The Track of Horror and The Invisible change the studio. Should these films prove to be successful, Hollywood Pictures could possibly be revived after all. Disney obviously saw this, but not given, and closed the studio in April 2007.