Top stories
Orion Pictures
USINFO | 2013-05-29 11:53
Orion Pictures Corporation was an American independent production company that produced movies from 1978 until 1998. It was formed in 1978 as a joint venture between Warner Bros. and three former top-level executives of United Artists. Never a large motion picture producer, Orion achieved a comparatively high reputation for Hollywood quality. Woody Allen and several other Oscar-winning directors worked with Orion during its most successful years in 1978–1992.
Almost all of Orion's releases from 1982 onward, as well as most of the AIP and Filmways backlogs and all the television output originally produced and distributed by Orion Television, now bear the MGM name. However, in most cases, the 1980s Orion logo is retained or added on, in the case of the Filmways and AIP libraries.
Orion releases produced by the Hemdale Film Corporation and Nelson Entertainment are included in MGM's library as well, and are incorporated into the Orion library. MGM did not acquire the Hemdale films, however, (which included The Terminator, Hoosiers, and Platoon) until it bought the Epic Productions library in 1998. The Nelson films (among them including the Bill & Ted films) weren't acquired until MGM acquired the pre-1996 library of PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, Nelson's successor-in-interest, although the television and digital rights to certain films are now with Paramount Pictures, with television syndication handled on behalf of Paramount by Trifecta Entertainment & Media.
Many of the film and television holdings of The Samuel Goldwyn Company have now also been incorporated into the Orion library (with ownership currently held by MGM), and the copyright on some of this material is held by Orion, except The New Adventures of Flipper now carries the MGM Television Entertainment copyright.
