Hollywood Pictures Company was an American film production label of The Walt Disney Studios, a division of The Walt Disney Company. Similar to Disney's Touchstone Pictures and former Miramax and Dimension film labels, it produced films for a more mature adult audience with darker themes than Walt Disney Pictures. While then-Disney chief Michael Eisner at first intended Hollywood Pictures to be a full-fledged studio, like Touchstone, in later years its operations had been scaled back and its management was merged with the flagship Walt Disney Pictures studio. Its most profitable film was M. Night Shyamalan's film The Sixth Sense, which grossed over $600 million worldwide upon its 1999 release.
History
Hollywood Pictures Company was incorporated on March 30, 1984. Because of the success of Disney's more-mature film division Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures was activated on February 1, 1989. Ricardo Mestres was appointed the division's first president, moving over from Touchstone Pictures. The division was created to create opportunities for up and coming executives and double its feature film output to fill the gap left by the contraction in the industry which includes closure of MGM/UA's United Artists and financial problems at Lorimar-Telepictures and De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. With Touchstone aligned with Hollywood, the two Disney Studio production divisions would share the same marketing and distribution staffs. Hollywood was expected to be producing 12 films a year by 1991 and to share funding from the Silver Screen Partners IV. The company's first release was Arachnophobia in 1990. On October 23, 1990, The Walt Disney Company formed Touchwood Pacific Partners I to supplant the Silver Screen Partnership series as their movie studios' primary funding source. After the collapse of their just renewed deal at Paramount Pictures, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer moved their production company to Hollywood Pictures in January 1991. The division issued primarily inexpensive comedies for the first six years with a few box office flops films, amongst them Holy Matrimony, Aspen Extreme, Super Mario Bros., Swing Kids, Blame It on the Bellboy, Born Yesterday and Guilty as Sin. The division only had one box office success, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and one critical success, The Joy Luck Club, which did not out weigh the general anemic box office record of the division. On April 26, 1994, Mestres was forced to resign after the lackluster performance of the division. Mestres moved to long term production deal with the studio. On June 27, 1994, Michael Lynton was appointed as new division president after moving from the Disney Publishing Group, where he was senior vice president and oversaw domestic publishing units including Hyperion Books. Mestres left Lynton a few potential hits: Robert Redford's Quiz Show, the Sarah Jessica Parker-Antonio Banderas drama Miami Rhapsody, and Dangerous Minds, starring Michelle Pfeiffer. In 1997, Lynton left for a position at Penguin Group. By 2001, Hollywood Pictures had produced 50 films, but its operation had been phased out. After being dormant for five years, the brand was re-activated for low-budget genre films. The first film released by the resurrected Hollywood were the three horror films—Stay Alive, Primeval, and The Invisible. Around that time, Disney stopped releasing under the label in 2007 as the company announced a focus on its core brand names from its main film studio, Touchstone, ABC, ESPN, and Pixar.
