Paramount Pictures

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Paramount Pictures was founded on the 8th of May 1912, making it older than almost every film studio on earth. Only a handful of European companies and one American rival, Universal Pictures, can claim a longer history. Yet what makes Paramount's story worth telling is not just its age. It is the fact that a Hungarian-born nickelodeon investor, a Utah theatre owner, and a stage director who had never made a film all managed to build something that would outlast wars, bankruptcy, two Supreme Court rulings, and a string of corporate ownership changes spanning more than a century.

  The mountain on its logo has been there from nearly the beginning, sketched on a napkin at a meeting in 1914 by W. W. Hodkinson, who drew it from memory. The stars ringing that mountain once numbered twenty-four, one for each actor and actress under contract. What were those early stars being asked to do, and why did the studio put them under such tight control? What brought Paramount to its knees in 1933, and what pulled it back? How did a company that once owned nearly two thousand cinema screens end up stripped of every one of them by order of the Supreme Court? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Napkin and the Mountain

  ›

  W. W. Hodkinson drew the first version of Paramount's mountain logo on a napkin in 1914, reportedly tracing Ben Lomond in Utah from memory. He surrounded the peak with a circle of stars as a tribute to the studio's contracted talent. At the time Hodkinson signed his distribution deal with Famous Players and the Lasky Company on the 15th of May 1914, studios were still selling films on a statewide basis, which left producers at the mercy of fragmented regional middlemen. Hodkinson changed that by becoming the first successful nationwide distributor in Hollywood.

  The logo accumulated meaning as the studio grew. When Adolph Zukor put twenty-four actors and actresses under contract in 1916, the original count of stars in that arc matched the roster exactly. The number was reduced to twenty-two in 1967, and the hidden symbolism was quietly dropped. A 1951 redesign turned the mountain into a matte painting by Jan Domela, and a newer version appeared in 1953 for Paramount's first films in 3D format. The complete overhaul came in December 1986, when computer-generated imagery replaced the painted image. That version, with its CGI stars, was designed by Dario Campanile and animated by multiple effects houses including Omnibus/Abel for the stars and Apogee, Inc. for the mountain itself. Michael Giacchino composed a new fanfare for the 2011 logo, which added a surrounding mountain range and sunlight breaking behind the peak. That fanfare carried through to the Paramount Players and Paramount Animation versions as well.

• 3. Famous Players, Famous Plays

  ›

  Adolph Zukor had watched working-class immigrants flock to nickelodeons and concluded the format needed to aim higher. With partners Daniel Frohman and Charles Frohman he planned a company built around feature-length films starring the leading theatrical performers of the era, which is where the slogan "Famous Players in Famous Plays" came from. The studio's first film was Les Amours de la reine Elisabeth, starring Sarah Bernhardt.

  At almost the same moment, a separate producer named Jesse L. Lasky was borrowing money from his brother-in-law, Samuel Goldfish, later known as Samuel Goldwyn, to open his own company. Lasky hired Cecil B. DeMille as his first employee, even though DeMille was a stage director with virtually no film experience. DeMille found a rented horse barn between Vine Street, Selma Avenue, Argyle Avenue, and Sunset Boulevard and converted it into a production facility. Their first feature, The Squaw Man, was released in 1914.

  By mid-1913 Famous Players had completed five films. The merger that would unite these competing energies came on the 28th of June 1916, when Zukor and Lasky bought Hodkinson out of Paramount and combined Famous Players, the Lasky Company, and Paramount into a single entity. The new Famous Players-Lasky Corporation became the largest film company of its time. Lasky, Goldwyn, and DeMille ran production; Hiram Abrams ran distribution; and Zukor made the strategy. The merger was finalized on the 7th of November 1916.

• 4. Stars, Block Booking, and the Movie Factory

  ›

  Zukor believed that stars were the engine of the entire business. He signed Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, Wallace Reid, and Marguerite Clark among others, building a roster that no rival could match. That roster enabled a practice called block booking: an exhibitor who wanted a particular star's films had to purchase a full year's worth of other Paramount productions as part of the same deal. The arrangement gave Paramount a commanding position through the 1920s and into the 1930s.

  The studio used that position to run at an extraordinary pace. During its peak years Paramount turned out sixty to seventy pictures a year, filling its own chain of nearly two thousand screens while pressuring other chains through block booking to take the rest. In the sound era, talkies brought in a new generation of talent: Maurice Chevalier, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Bing Crosby, Cary Grant, the Marx Brothers, and W.C. Fields among many others. Mae West's 1933 films She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel added greatly to box-office receipts but also helped trigger the enforcement of the Production Code, because the Catholic Legion of Decency threatened a boycott if the industry did not act.

  Animation ran alongside the live-action operation. Paramount released cartoons produced by the Fleischer Studios in New York City starting in 1927. By 1935, polls showed Popeye the Sailor had surpassed Mickey Mouse in popularity. After the Fleischer brothers stopped speaking to each other and an expansion into feature films faltered, Paramount acquired the studio outright and renamed it Famous Studios, which continued producing cartoons until 1967.

• 5. Bankruptcy and the Supreme Court

  ›

  The over-expansion that made Paramount dominant in the 1920s left it dangerously exposed when the Depression arrived. The company had used overvalued stock for acquisitions and accumulated a $21 million debt. On the 26th of January 1933 Paramount entered receivership, and on the 14th of March 1933 it filed for bankruptcy. Bankruptcy trustees were appointed on the 17th of April 1933, stripping Zukor of control. The reorganization plan was formally proposed on the 3rd of December 1934. Federal Judge Alfred C. Coxe Jr. approved it on the 25th of April 1935, and the newly renamed Paramount Pictures Inc. emerged from court protection on the 4th of June 1935. Barney Balaban, whose Balaban and Katz theater chain Zukor had acquired in 1926, became president on the 2nd of July 1936 and successfully relaunched the studio.

  The legal trouble was not over. The government had been building an antitrust case for more than twenty years, driven by block booking and Paramount's monopoly over local markets including Detroit movie theaters through a subsidiary called United Detroit Theaters. The Supreme Court's 1948 decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. ruled that studios could not also own movie theater chains. The 1,500-screen theater chain was separated into a new company, United Paramount Theaters, on the 31st of December 1949. Leonard Goldenson, who had led the chain since 1938, remained as the new company's president. Goldenson would eventually use cash from controlling prime downtown real estate to acquire the struggling ABC television network in February 1953.

• 6. Gulf and Western and the New Hollywood

  ›

  By the early 1960s, Paramount was in serious difficulty. Its theater chain was gone, investments in early pay television and the DuMont Television Network had produced nothing, and the company had sold KTLA, the first commercial station on the West Coast, to Gene Autry in 1964 for $12.5 million. The Paramount Building in Times Square was sold to raise cash. The founding generation still ran the company: Zukor, born in 1873, was chairman emeritus and referred to Balaban, born in 1888, as "the boy."

  In 1966 Gulf and Western Industries, a conglomerate led by Charles Bluhdorn, bought the sinking studio. Bluhdorn immediately installed a virtually unknown producer named Robert Evans as head of production. Evans held the job for eight years, and over that span he restored the studio's commercial standing with a run of films including The Odd Couple, Rosemary's Baby, Love Story, The Godfather, Paper Moon, Chinatown, and 3 Days of the Condor. Gulf and Western also bought the Desilu Productions television studio from Lucille Ball in 1967. Among the shows that came with that purchase were Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, and Mannix.

  By 1976 a new television-trained team had taken the production reins, headed by Barry Diller. His associates included Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dawn Steel, and Don Simpson, each of whom would later run a major studio. The team's strategy was the high-concept film, typified by Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Diller also proposed a fourth commercial television network, the Paramount Television Service, and purchased the Hughes Television Network satellite capacity in 1976 to support it. He left for 20th Century Fox in 1984, taking the fourth-network idea with him, and it became Fox Broadcasting.

• 7. Star Trek, Titanic, and the Franchise Era

  ›

  Star Trek became so central to Paramount's finances in the 1990s that studio executives had begun calling it simply "the franchise" in the 1980s. By 1998, the property's movies, television shows, books, home video releases, and licensing generated enough revenue that, according to the source, it was "not possible to spend any reasonable amount of time at Paramount and not be aware of" its presence. Filming for Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine alone required up to nine of the studio's thirty-six largest sound stages.

  The 1994 Viacom acquisition brought Paramount under the leadership of chairman Jonathan Dolgen and president Sherry Lansing. Their period produced three Best Picture Academy Award winners: Titanic, Braveheart, and Forrest Gump. Titanic, co-produced with 20th Century Fox and Lightstorm Entertainment, grossed over $1.8 billion worldwide and became the highest-grossing film up to that point in time. Viacom and Chris-Craft Industries launched United Paramount Network in 1995 with Star Trek: Voyager as the flagship series, fulfilling Diller's original vision from roughly twenty-five years earlier.

  The merger history folded in on itself repeatedly. Viacom had once been the syndication arm of CBS; Paramount had once invested in CBS in 1928. When Viacom acquired CBS in 2000 and Paramount distributed through it, two institutions that had split and circled each other for decades ended up under the same roof. Viacom bought Famous Music, the publishing arm that traced back to the "Famous Players" era, until selling it to Sony/ATV in 2007, ending nearly eight decades of Paramount involvement in music publishing.

• 8. Digital, Streaming, and Skydance

  ›

  In 2014, Paramount became the first major Hollywood studio to distribute all of its films exclusively in digital form, closing the era of physical film print distribution entirely. That same year Walt Disney Studios, having acquired Lucasfilm, gained Paramount's remaining distribution and marketing rights to future Indiana Jones films, though Paramount permanently retained distribution rights to the first four films and received financial participation in any additional ones.

  The corporate path after 2005 involved a Viacom split into two companies followed by a 2019 remerger into ViacomCBS, which then renamed itself Paramount Global in February 2022. In 2024, terms were set for a merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media at a valuation of $28 billion. Negotiations continued into 2025 between Skydance CEO David Ellison and Shari Redstone. The merger received regulatory approval in July 2025, and the deal closed the following month, forming Paramount Skydance. As of August 2025, the byline below the logo now reads "A Skydance Corporation" in place of the parent company names that had appeared there for decades. On the 28th of February 2026, Netflix received a $2.8 billion breakup fee from Paramount Skydance after Paramount withdrew its bid to acquire parts of Warner Bros. Discovery, pointing to the studio's continuing appetite for consolidation even after its own ownership changed hands.