Institution Research - Paramount Pictures

Paramount pictures is a film production company that produces and distributes film across the world, they were founded in 1912 and are currently owned by media company Viacom, it is currently America’s oldest film production studio and is the only remaining studio to be situated in Hollywood, there current revenue stream is more that 3 billion annually.

Paramount were founded in 1912 under the name Famous Players Film Company, right from the offset they started making feature length films for the target audience, these films led to the studios being more and more recognized, in 1914’s they started releasing films under “Paramount Pictures Corporation”, this led to Paramount becoming the worlds leading film distributor, this led to paramount getting famous and well known actors such as Gloria Swanson etc, this led to them introducing the “Block Booking” system which meant that if a theatre wanted to show a film that had a well known star they had to buy other paramount films as well this is what led to paramount being the no1 film company at the time, with this new found success paramount’s key people wanted to expand this led to them building over 2,000 movie theatres and 2 production studios to maximize revenue they also acquired a 50% equity in CBS(Columbia Broadcasting System). In 1936 Zukor bought out most of the shareholders of paramount and restructured the company as Paramount Pictures, Inc, this led to paramount making some of the most memorable films of recent time, which includes titles such as Titanic and Saving Private Ryan, but early into the 2000’s paramount announced that its parent company’s have split the announcement that CBS and Viacom splitting left Paramount with networks such as MTV and BET.

In 2005 Paramount bought out DreamWorks which is a modern production studios that produces different types of media from films to video games, the deal in which DreamWorks was bought was roughly around 1.6 billion, this led to paramount getting the distribution rights to DreamWorks Animations film which raked in even more money with the releases of the Shrek Franchise, this deal was active until 2008 when DreamWorks announced that they were looking for a new distribution partner. Also during this time Paramount were one of the first major film production/distribution studio to support physical HD Media in the form of Blu-ray and HD-DVD this early support for the format led them to re-releasing there key film franchises in the high definition format as well as adding extras due to the disc capabilities of the physical disc format, also paramount extended there film distribution horizons by opting to distribute through downloads and streaming media through 3rd Party hardware and software e.g. Netflix and through game consoles i.e. Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.