Paramount Pictures Corporation, commonly known as Paramount Pictures or simply Paramount, is an American film production and distribution company and the flagship namesake subsidiary of Paramount Skydance. Founded on May 8, 1912, it is the sixth-oldest global film studio and the second-oldest in the United States behind Universal Pictures, and it is one of the Big Five studios located within the city limits of Los Angeles.
In 1916, film producer Adolph Zukor put 24 actors and actresses under contract and honored each with a star on the logo. In 1967, the number of stars was reduced to 22 and their hidden meaning was dropped. In 2014, Paramount Pictures became the first major Hollywood studio to distribute all of its films in digital form only. The company's headquarters and studios are located at 5555 Melrose Avenue, Hollywood, California.
The most commercially successful film franchises from Paramount Pictures include Star Trek, Indiana Jones, Top Gun, Mission: Impossible, and Transformers. Additionally, the studio's library includes many notable films such as The Greatest Show on Earth, The Ten Commandments, Love Story, The Godfather, Grease, Ghost, Forrest Gump, Titanic and Saving Private Ryan, with four of the nine films winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, and all of them were among the highest-grossing films of all time, with Titanic breaking the record during its initial release. Paramount Pictures is a member of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), and is currently one of seven film studios of Paramount Skydance Studios, alongside a 49% stake in Miramax, a 50% stake in United International Pictures, Paramount Players, a revival of Republic Pictures, and Skydance Animation.
Paramount is the sixth-oldest surviving film studio globally, after Gaumont (1895), Pathé (1896), Titanus (1904), Nordisk Film (1906) and Universal Pictures (1912). It is the last major film studio still headquartered in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles.
Paramount Pictures dates its existence from the 1912 founding date of the Famous Players Film Company. Hungarian-born founder Adolph Zukor, who had been an early investor in nickelodeons, saw that movies appealed mainly to working-class immigrants. With partners Daniel Frohman and Charles Frohman he planned to offer feature-length films that would appeal to the middle class by featuring the leading theatrical players of the time, leading to the slogan "Famous Players in Famous Plays". By mid-1913, Famous Players had completed five films, and Zukor was on his way to success. Its first film was Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth, which starred Sarah Bernhardt.
That same year, another aspiring producer, Jesse L. Lasky, opened Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company with money borrowed from his brother-in-law, Samuel Goldfish, later known as Samuel Goldwyn. The Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company hired as their first employee a stage director with virtually no film experience, Cecil B. DeMille, who found a suitable site in Hollywood. This place was a rented old horse barn converted into a production facility with an enlarged open-air stage located between Vine Street, Selma Avenue, Argyle Avenue and Sunset Boulevard. It was later known as the Lasky-DeMille Barn. In 1914, their first feature film, The Squaw Man was released.
On May 8, 1914, Paramount Pictures Corporation, previously known as Progressive Pictures, was founded by a Utah theatre owner, W. W. Hodkinson, who had bought and merged five smaller firms. On May 15, 1914, Hodkinson signed a five-year contract with the Famous Players Film Company, the Lasky Company and Bosworth, Inc. to distribute their films. Actor, director and producer Hobart Bosworth had started production of a series of Jack London movies. Paramount was the first successful nationwide distributor. Until this time, films were sold on a statewide or regional basis, which had proved costly to film producers. Also, Famous Players and Lasky were privately owned while Paramount was a corporation.
In 1916, Zukor engineered a three-way merger of his Famous Players, the Lasky Company, and Paramount. Zukor and Lasky bought Hodkinson out of Paramount, and merged the three companies into one. The new company Lasky and Zukor founded on June 28, Famous Players–Lasky Corporation, although it continued to use the name "Paramount", as well. As a result, it became the largest film company at the time with a value of US$12.5 million (equivalent to $248.2 million in 2024). The corporation was able to grow quickly, with Lasky and his partners Goldwyn and DeMille running the production side, Hiram Abrams in charge of distribution, and Zukor making great plans. With only the exhibitor-owned First National as a rival, Famous Players–Lasky and its "Paramount Pictures" soon dominated the business. The fusion was finalized on November 7, 1916.
Because Zukor believed in stars, he signed and developed many of the leading early stars, including Mary Pickford, Marguerite Clark, Pauline Frederick, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, and Wallace Reid. With so many important players, Paramount was able to introduce "block booking", which meant that an exhibitor who wanted a particular star's films had to buy a year's worth of other Paramount productions. It was this system that gave Paramount a leading position in the 1920s and 1930s, but which led the government to pursue it on antitrust grounds for more than twenty years.
By the mid-1920s, the old Lasky-DeMille barn property was not big enough to handle all of the studios' West Coast productions. On January 5, 1926, Lasky reached an agreement to buy the Robert Brunton Studios, a 26-acre facility owned by United Pictures and located at 5451 Marathon Street, for $1.0 million (equivalent to $14.1 million in 2024). On March 29, the company began an eight-month building program to renovate the existing facilities and erect new ones. On May 8, 1926 Lasky moved operations from the Sunset and Vine lot to the new building. At present, those facilities are still part of the Paramount Pictures headquarters. Zukor hired independent producer B. P. Schulberg, an unerring eye for new talent, to run the new West Coast operations.
On April 1, 1927, the company name was changed to Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation. In September 1927, the Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation studio in Astoria (New York City) was temporarily closed with the objective of equipping it with the technology for the production of sound films. In the same year, Paramount began releasing Inkwell Imps, animated cartoons produced by Max and Dave Fleischer's Fleischer Studios in New York City. The Fleischers, veterans in the animation industry, were among the few animation producers capable of challenging the prominence of Walt Disney.
The Paramount newsreel series Paramount News ran from 1927 to 1957. Paramount was also one of the first Hollywood studios to release what were known at that time as "talkies", and in 1929, released their first musical, Innocents of Paris. Richard A. Whiting and Leo Robin composed the score for the film; Maurice Chevalier starred and sang the most famous song from the film, "Louise".
Publix, Balaban and Katz, Loew's competition and wonder theaters
The driving force behind Paramount's rise was Zukor. He built a chain of nearly 2,000 screens, ran two production studios (in Astoria, New York, now the Kaufman Astoria Studios, and Hollywood, California), and became an early investor in radio, acquiring for the corporation a 50% interest in the new Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928, selling it within a few years. This would not be the last time Paramount and CBS crossed paths.
By acquiring the successful Balaban & Katz chain in 1926, Zukor gained the services of Barney Balaban (who would eventually become Paramount's president in 1936), his brother A. J. Balaban (who would eventually supervise all stage production nationwide and produce talkie shorts), and their partner Sam Katz, who would run the Paramount-Publix theatre chain in New York City from the thirty-five-story Paramount Theatre Building on Times Square.