History CreatorKiller / FilmStudiosAndProductionCompanies

* Atlantic Releasing Corporation was one of the bigger indie film studios in the 70s and 80s, and while the company didn't pull out massive hits, the company did score success with films like ''Film/ValleyGirl'', ''Film/NightOfTheComet'' and ''Film/TeenWolf''. Unfortunately, things came crashing down when the company decided to distribute ''Film/TheGarbagePailKidsMovie''. Costing anywhere from $1 to $30 million to make, the film only raked in $1 million at the box office and is considered one of the worst, if not ''the'' worst, movies of all time. Parents complained about the film's [[WhatDoYouMeanItsForKids rather adult content for a kids' film]], and wound up successfully pulling the film from theaters only a week after its premiere. Director Rod Amateau never took helm of another major project after this film. After this film came a truly amazing streak of flops; with the exception of ''Film/TeenWolf Too'' (which even then was critically panned), nearly every movie released by Atlantic after ''Garbage Pail Kids'' flopped at the box office. The amount of losses from the film and other {{Box Office Bomb}}s released during the time caused the company to sell themselves to Island Pictures, and the Atlantic library later went to Creator/MetroGoldwynMayer through a long series of acquisitions.

** Third Rail Releasing was a joint venture between TWC and Genius Products (their UsefulNotes/{{DVD}} distributor at the time) for theatrical distribution of lower-budgeted fare. It only lasted for a year and was quietly deactivated after the commercial failure of ''Film/{{Outlander}}'' (which was not a low budget production).

* UsefulNotes/TedTurner Pictures was unable to produce another movie after the critical and commercial calamity that was ''Film/GodsAndGenerals'', which also killed prospects of [[FranchiseKiller a third Civil War film]] that began with ''Film/{{Gettysburg}}''. This was an ignominious end to Turner's media career, having ended any involvement with the networks he founded a decade before the film's release amongst the wreckage of the [[Creator/WarnerBrosDiscovery AOL Time Warner]] deal; he has been focused on philanthropy and his chain of bison restaurants ever since.

* Cinergi Pictures, which was formed following Andrew G. Vajna's departure from Carolco, tried to rival the latter with films featuring big-name stars and a distribution agreement with Creator/{{Disney}}. Unfortunately, the triple-hit knockout of ''Film/ShadowConspiracy'', ''Film/DeepRising'' and ''Film/AnAlanSmitheeFilmBurnHollywoodBurn'' sent the firm into financial meltdown quickly, eventually shutting down after the third film grossed a staggering $52,850 against a $10 million budget. The rights to all of Cinergi's films save for ''Film/DieHardWithAVengeance'' were sold to Creator/{{Disney}} following its closure as a condition of canceling the distribution agreement. Vajna would use the name on an intermittent basis on video games and Hungarian films over the next decade and spend the rest of his life as head of the Hungarian National Film Fund. At least the studio was lucky to have been hanging around several years longer than Carolco.

** Creator/TheWeinsteinCompany's Kaleidoscope-TWC label was killed off a total of ''two'' times. First, it was originally formed to distribute direct-to-video family films. Unfortunately for them, the poor sales of the 2008 CGI version of ''Film/TheNuttyProfessor1963'' led to the label being shelved for a couple of years, with further family releases (like ''WesternAnimation/UnstableFables'' and ''WesternAnimation/HoodwinkedTooHoodVersusEvil'') being released under the company's normal name. Then, in 2013, it was relaunched and released its first theatrical film, ''WesternAnimation/EscapeFromPlanetEarth''. Its negative critical reception and mediocre box office take-ins proved that it would be its last. The company's next family release, ''Film/Paddington2014'', was instead released under the TWC-Dimension banner, and it looked unlikely that Kaleidoscope-TWC would be releasing another film soon... until 2016 when the oft-delayed ''Underdogs'' finally made its way to Creator/{{Netflix}} and DVD.

* In 1968, failed aviator Edward L. Montoro founded Film Ventures International (FVI), an independent studio specializing in [[BMovie B-movies]], usually in the horror genre. They were notorious throughout TheSeventies for releasing films [[TheMockbuster derivative of the big studios' blockbusters]], making them Creator/TheAsylum of their time. Still, these films racked up huge profits keeping them afloat. All this success was not to last. In 1982, FVI churned out ''[[Film/TheLastShark Great White]]'': a [[SerialNumbersFiledOff blatantly obvious]] ''Film/{{Jaws}}'' knock-off from Italy. When Creator/{{Universal}} got wind of this, they sued FVI for plagiarism and won, [[ScrewedByTheLawyers screwing the film out of release]]. This was a huge blow on FVI's part as they spent $4 million to promote the film and the withdrawal of ''Great White'' snowballed into major financial issues. The studio hoped that ''Mutant'' would turn over their fortunes, but it ended up being a BoxOfficeBomb. The last straw came when Montoro nabbed a million dollars from FVI to bail out of his divorce and [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere flee the US]], forcing the company to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. INI Corporations, a TV syndication company, acquired the now defunct FVI studio in 1985 and revamped them into [[NoBudget an even lower-budgeted]] distribution firm. Their output consisted of [[LoopholeAbuse questionable]] rereleased/retitled films with new, yet cheap, title sequences, often incorporating clips from other movies! FVI's "films" wound up on ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000'' where their opening titles became a prime source of mockery. The studio was laughed out into oblivion by the end of TheNineties. Around 2011, FVI resurrected themselves and attempted a comeback of their glory days, but their website was seized two years later, so it's safe to say that they're gone for good.

* ''Anime/FinalFantasyTheSpiritsWithin'' killed Square Pictures and nearly killed the merger between Square and Enix (the companies did eventually merge into Creator/SquareEnix in 2003), and pressured Hironobu Sakaguchi, the guy who came up with the idea for ''Franchise/FinalFantasy'' (probably saving Square from shutting down entirely back in [[TheEighties the 1980s]]) into resigning from the company[[note]]He left in 2003 to form Mistwalker, creators of ''VideoGame/BlueDragon'', ''VideoGame/LostOdyssey'' and ''VideoGame/TheLastStory''[[/note]], since the film was his [[BoxOfficeBomb 100-million-dollar-losing project]]. To put this into perspective, this was during the TurnOfTheMillennium, a time when Squaresoft was one of ''the most'' successful and dominant video game companies. Square has had many success stories in the years that followed, but it still has never completely reversed the backslide it suffered from the failure of ''Spirits Within''. Whereas at the turn of the century Square was seen as ''the'' single greatest RPG maker in the entire industry of gaming, and they still have enough {{Cash Cow Franchise}}s that they're not going anywhere anytime soon, their position of complete dominance brought about by groundbreaking games such as ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'' has long since faded.

* The British film company Goldcrest never really recovered from the one-two punch of 1985's ''Film/{{Revolution|1985}}'' (a massively expensive movie about the American Revolution with the singular casting of Creator/AlPacino and Creator/NastassjaKinski - which may explain why [[GenreKiller it was 15 years until]] [[Film/ThePatriot there was another one]]) and 1986's ''Film/AbsoluteBeginners'' (a hugely expensive musical set in the 1950s which [[StarDerailingRole derailed star Eddie O'Connell's career]] (his Website/IMDb page is very skimpy after the film, and he has nothing after 2003), and served as a speed bump for Patsy Kensit's). See the book ''My Indecision Is Final'' for the whole sordid story.

* Creator/DreamWorksAnimation entered an agreement to merge itself with Creator/NBCUniversal after a string of box office failures in the early 2010s, namely ''WesternAnimation/RiseOfTheGuardians'', ''WesternAnimation/{{Turbo}}'', ''WesternAnimation/MrPeabodyAndSherman'', and ''WesternAnimation/PenguinsOfMadagascar''. The latter two caused a loss of $106 million in box office gross ($57 million for ''Peabody'', $49 million for ''Penguins''), making it unviable for the animation studio to operate without a major studio backing. They also caused Pacific Data Images, who helped produce both films and the studio's famed ''Franchise/{{Shrek}}'' series, to shut down as part of a restructuring of the company.

* Acquired by Creator/{{Disney}} in 2011, UTV Motion Pictures served as the company's film production and distribution label for Indian films and Disney titles in that region. UTV was successful with UsefulNotes/{{Bollywood}} blockbusters such as ''PK'' and ''Chennai Express'', and Disney began developing Indian films under the Disney label. Unfortunately, UTV couldn't keep up their momentum, and in 2016 they released ''Mohenjo Daro''. Despite boasting stars such as Hrithik Roshan and the director of ''Film/{{Lagaan}}'', ''Mohenjo Daro'' garnered negative word-of-mouth for [[TroubledProduction the multiple problems it faced during production]]. When the film proved to be a financial and critical failure upon its eventual release, [[http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/disney-india-confirms-focus-hollywood-924929 Disney decided to pull out of Bollywood film production, placing UTV Motion Pictures on the chopping block, merely only used as a distributor for Disney theatrical titles.]] Disney wouldn't try to get back to the Bollywood market until it acquired Star India as part of its takeover of 21st Century Fox, giving Disney a much stronger presence in the market and a perfect opportunity to take a second crack at it.

* [[Creator/TwentiethCenturyStudios 20th Century Fox]]'s genre film label Fox Atomic never really took off in its first two years of existence and the failure of ''The Comebacks'' prompted them to scale down productions and close their marketing divisions. The combined failures of ''Film/MissMarch'' and ''Film/TwelveRounds'' proved to be the straws that finally broke the camel's back as the label was folded outright and their later projects were sent to other Fox labels.

* Acquired by Creator/{{Disney}} in 2011, UTV Motion Pictures served as the company's film production and distribution label for Indian films. UTV was successful with UsefulNotes/{{Bollywood}} blockbusters such as ''PK'' and ''Chennai Express'', and Disney began developing Indian films under the Disney label. Unfortunately, UTV couldn't keep up their momentum, and in 2016 they released ''Mohenjo Daro''. Despite boasting stars such as Hrithik Roshan and the director of ''Film/{{Lagaan}}'', ''Mohenjo Daro'' garnered negative word-of-mouth for [[TroubledProduction the multiple problems it faced during production]]. When the film proved to be a financial and critical failure upon its eventual release, [[http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/disney-india-confirms-focus-hollywood-924929 Disney decided to pull out of Bollywood film production, placing UTV Motion Pictures on the chopping block.]] Disney wouldn't try to get back to the Bollywood market until it acquired Star India as part of its takeover of 21st Century Fox, giving Disney a much stronger presence in the market and a perfect opportunity to take a second crack at it.

* Creator/TheCannonGroup. By the mid-'80s, the heads of CG - Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus - decided to go big and establish Cannon as a major studio. They purchased rights to several different franchises: ''Franchise/{{Superman}}'', ''Franchise/MastersOfTheUniverse'', ''Franchise/SpiderMan'' and ''Franchise/CaptainAmerica'', along with several other projects, and released a total of ''43'' [[OneManArmy movies in 1986 alone]]. Most of them flopped heavily, but it was the failures of ''Film/SupermanIVTheQuestForPeace'' (which had budget cut severely to a meager 17 million and still bombed heavily), ''Film/TheBarbarians'' (released in 1987 when the brief frenzy caused by the ''Franchise/{{Conan|TheBarbarian}}'' movies faded completely) and ''Film/MastersOfTheUniverse'' (which brought a small profit [[UsefulNotes/HollywoodAccounting only when Mattel Inc. was conned on the copyright issues]]) that completely ruined the attempt by Cannon Group to become a legitimate film studio. Not too surprisingly, Cannon closed up shop by the dawn of the 1990s.

* ''Anime/FinalFantasyTheSpiritsWithin'' killed Square Pictures and nearly killed the merger between Squaresoft and Enix (the companies did eventually merge into Creator/SquareEnix in 2003), and pressured Hironobu Sakaguchi, the guy who came up with the idea for ''Franchise/FinalFantasy'' (probably saving Squaresoft from shutting down entirely back in [[TheEighties the 1980s]]) into resigning from the company[[note]]He left in 2003 to form Mistwalker, creators of ''VideoGame/BlueDragon'', ''VideoGame/LostOdyssey'' and ''VideoGame/TheLastStory''[[/note]], since the film was his [[BoxOfficeBomb 100-million-dollar-losing project]]. To put this into perspective, this was during the TurnOfTheMillennium, a time when Squaresoft was one of ''the most'' successful and dominant video game companies. Square has had many success stories in the years that followed, but it still has never completely reversed the backslide it suffered from the failure of ''Spirits Within''. Whereas at the turn of the century Square was seen as ''the'' single greatest RPG maker in the entire industry of gaming, and they still have enough {{Cash Cow Franchise}}s that they're not going anywhere anytime soon, their position of complete dominance brought about by groundbreaking games such as ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'' has long since faded.

* Caravan Pictures was intended to be a specialty division for Creator/{{Disney}} when it was formed by famous Hollywood producers Roger Birnbaum and Joe Roth in 1992. The label's first movies (''[[Film/TheThreeMusketeers1993 The Three Musketeers]]'', ''Film/AngelsInTheOutfield'', and ''A Low Down Dirty Shame'' to name a few) were moderate to large box office successes, but when Roth left the studio to become chairman of Walt Disney Pictures, a string of ''huge'' {{Box Office Bomb}}s followed and the few films that ''did'' turn up a large profit (''Film/WhileYouWereSleeping'', ''Film/GIJane'', and ''Film/SixDaysSevenNights'') were not enough to convince Disney to repair the label's critically damaged reputation. This led to Birnbaum, who was placed in the chairman's seat following Roth's departure, leaving the studio to form his own company, Spyglass Entertainment, in 1998. Disney shut down Caravan in 1999 following the release of the commercially successful but critically thrashed ''Film/InspectorGadget1999''.[[note]]Perhaps there was a bit of grim foreshadowing in their LogoJoke at the end of that film in which the figure walking down the road in their logo sprouts a propeller (a la Gadget) and flies off, never to be seen again.[[/note]] What remained of Caravan was absorbed into Birnbaum's then-new Spyglass Entertainment.

* The box-office failure of ''Film/HeavensGate'' was a major blow to Creator/UnitedArtists, which destroyed their reputation with then-parent Transamerica, who sold them to the Tracinda Corporation and then were merged with Creator/MetroGoldwynMayer. The company spent the 2000s as an arthouse studio, but when MGM filed for bankruptcy in late 2010, UA seemingly went kaput; MGM promised to make new films under the UA brand after reacquiring their 100% in the company, but that never came to be. Since then, MGM has used the UA name on three separate occasions: In 2014, with the launch of United Artists Media Group (which would be folded into MGM Television in 2015), in 2018 with United Artists Digital Studios (which would be folded into MGM in 2020), and in 2019 with United Artists Releasing, a rebrand of MGM's Mirror joint-venture with Annapurna Pictures, whose operations would be folded into MGM by parent company Amazon in March 2023.

* A bad fall followed by a fast recovery: Alan Ladd, Jr. was perhaps one of the top, if not ''the'' top, Hollywood executives during his tenure at [[Creator/TwentiethCenturyStudios 20th Century Fox]], having overseen the production of ''Franchise/StarWars'' and ''Film/{{Alien}}''[[note]]the former of which actually ended up saving the studio -- Ladd green-lit the expensive ''Star Wars'' thinking it'd be one of the last films Fox, then nearing bankruptcy, would likely produce[[/note]], but after the latter was released he left the studio to start his own company, and while it did produce some blockbuster hits, like ''Film/PoliceAcademy'', and ''Film/ChariotsOfFire'' for Creator/WarnerBros (plus ''Film/BladeRunner'', which wasn't a smash upon release, but did well enough), he could not really survive on his own and ended up producing three high-profile flops in 1983-1984, ''Film/TheRightStuff'', ''WesternAnimation/TwiceUponATime'', and ''Film/OnceUponATimeInAmerica'' (such a shame too, since these films have since been [[AcclaimedFlop recognized as classics]]). After these flops Ladd shuttered his studio and was left unheard of for a while, before going to Creator/{{MGM}} in 1985 and bouncing back to the top. After his tenure with that company, he re-established his studio in 1993 and again went alone, [[Film/AVeryBradySequel with moderate]] [[Film/{{Braveheart}} to high]] success. He stayed there until his death in 2022, with Creator/BenAffleck's film adaptation of ''Literature/GoneBabyGone'' being the last film Ladd was involved with.

* In 1995, The Jim Henson Company and Creator/SonyPictures founded Jim Henson Pictures in order to produce a variety of family films, including several [[Franchise/TheMuppets Muppet]] movies. They only made three films: ''Film/{{Buddy}}'', ''Film/MuppetsFromSpace'' and ''Film/TheAdventuresOfElmoInGrouchland''...[[BoxOfficeBomb and they all tanked at the box office]]. The back-to-back failures of the latter two films caused the two companies to end their partnership with the label being used in-name-only for whatever films Henson managed to produce; the Jim Henson Pictures name was finally retired after the lackluster performance of ''Good Boy''.

* The spectacular failure of ''Film/{{Mannequin}} 2: On the Move'' took down Gladden Entertainment, resulting in a messy lawsuit between them and 20th Century Fox over losses. Gladden was soon forced into bankruptcy due to unpaid residuals and its founder, David Begelman, [[DrivenToSuicide committed suicide]] in 1995 as a result of his company's ruination.