On the 8th of May 1914, a Utah theater owner named W. W. Hodkinson sketched a mountain on a napkin during a meeting, creating the visual identity that would outlive the man himself. This simple charcoal rendering of a peak, later identified as Ben Lomond in Utah, became the foundation for the Paramount Pictures logo, a symbol that has survived over a century of corporate upheaval. The original design featured twenty-four stars surrounding the mountain, a deliberate tribute to the twenty-four actors and actresses under contract at the time. This was not merely an aesthetic choice but a declaration of power, signaling that the studio had secured the leading theatrical players of the era to produce feature-length films for the middle class. The logo evolved from a rough sketch into a matte painting by Jan Domela in 1951, and eventually into a computer-generated image of a lake and stars in 1986, yet the core image of the mountain remains the oldest surviving Hollywood film logo. The fanfare that accompanied the logo, known as Paramount on Parade, was originally sung in the 1930 film of the same name, with lyrics that read, Proud of the crowd that will never be loud, it's Paramount on Parade. This auditory signature, composed by Michael Giacchino in the modern era, continues to play before every film, connecting the current audience to the silent film days of the 1910s. The number of stars was reduced to twenty-two in 1967, and their hidden meaning was dropped, yet the mountain itself stands as a testament to the studio's longevity. Paramount Pictures is the sixth-oldest global film studio and the second-oldest in the United States, trailing only Universal Pictures, and it remains the last major film studio still headquartered in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles. The studio's physical home at 5555 Melrose Avenue has been the center of operations since 1926, when the company moved from the Lasky-DeMille Barn, a converted horse barn that served as the first production facility. The studio lot has witnessed the rise and fall of countless careers, from the silent screen to the digital age, and its backlot still features facades of New York City locales such as Washington Square and Brooklyn. The Paramount mountain is not just a logo; it is a geographical anchor for a company that has defined the American film industry for over a century.
The Mogul And The Barn
Adolph Zukor, a Hungarian-born founder who had been an early investor in nickelodeons, saw that movies appealed mainly to working-class immigrants and decided to change the game by offering feature-length films that would appeal to the middle class. His strategy was encapsulated in the slogan Famous Players in Famous Plays, which promised to bring the leading theatrical players of the time to the screen. By mid-1913, Famous Players had completed five films, and Zukor was on his way to success, but the road to dominance was paved with mergers and betrayals. In 1916, Zukor engineered a three-way merger of his Famous Players, the Lasky Company, and Paramount, buying out Hodkinson and merging the three companies into one. The new company, Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, became the largest film company at the time with a value of one hundred million dollars. Zukor believed in stars, and 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. This system gave Paramount a leading position in the 1920s and 1930s, but it also led the government to pursue the company on antitrust grounds for more than twenty years. The studio's first feature film, The Squaw Man, was released in 1914, and it was followed by a rapid expansion of production capabilities. The Lasky-DeMille Barn, a rented old horse barn converted into a production facility, was the birthplace of the studio's early success, but it was not big enough to handle all of the studio's West Coast productions by the mid-1920s. On the 5th of January 1926, Lasky reached an agreement to buy the Robert Brunton Studios, a 26-acre facility located at 5451 Marathon Street, for one million dollars. The company began an eight-month building program to renovate the existing facilities and erect new ones, and on the 8th of May 1926, Lasky finally moved operations from the Sunset and Vine lot to the new building. Zukor hired independent producer B. P. Schulberg, an unerring eye for new talent, to run the new West Coast operations, and the studio began to produce sixty to seventy pictures a year. The studio became a movie factory, turning out a steady stream of films that filled the screens of its own theater chain. The driving force behind Paramount's rise was Zukor, who built a chain of nearly 2,000 screens and ran two production studios, one in Astoria, New York, and one in Hollywood, California. He also became an early investor in radio, acquiring a 50% interest in the new Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928, selling it within a few years, but the relationship between Paramount and CBS would never fully end.The Depression And The Code
The Great Depression brought financial ruin to Paramount, and the company filed for bankruptcy on the 14th of March 1933, after over-expansion and the use of overvalued Paramount stock for purchases created a twenty-one million dollar debt. The company remained under the control of trustees for more than a year in order to restructure the debt and pursue a reorganization plan, and on the 25th of April 1935, Federal Judge Alfred C. Coxe Jr. approved the reorganization of the Paramount-Publix Corporation under Section 77-B of the Bankruptcy Act. John E. Otterson became president of the re-emerged and newly renamed Paramount Pictures Inc., and Zukor returned to the company but was soon replaced by Y. Frank Freeman. The studio was successfully relaunched under the leadership of Barney Balaban, who was appointed president on the 2nd of July 1936, and Zukor was symbolically named chairman of the board. The studio continued to emphasize stars, and in the late 1920s and early 1930s, talkies brought in a range of powerful draws, including Richard Arlen, Nancy Carroll, Maurice Chevalier, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Charles Ruggles, Ruth Chatterton, William Powell, Mae West, Sylvia Sidney, Bing Crosby, Claudette Colbert, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Fredric March, Jack Oakie, Jeanette MacDonald, Carole Lombard, George Raft, Miriam Hopkins, Cary Grant, and Stuart Erwin. Mae West added greatly to Paramount's success with her suggestive movies She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel, but the sex appeal West gave in these movies also led to the enforcement of the Production Code, as the newly formed organization the Catholic Legion of Decency threatened a boycott if it was not enforced. Paramount cartoons produced by Fleischer Studios continued to be successful, with characters such as Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor becoming widely successful. One Fleischer series, Screen Songs, featured live-action music stars under contract to Paramount hosting sing-alongs of popular songs. The animation studio would rebound with Popeye, and in 1935, polls showed that Popeye was even more popular than Mickey Mouse. After an unsuccessful expansion into feature films, as well as the fact that Max and Dave Fleischer were no longer speaking to one another, Fleischer Studios was acquired by Paramount, which renamed the operation Famous Studios. That incarnation of the animation studio continued cartoon production until 1967, but has been historically dismissed as having largely failed to maintain the artistic acclaim the Fleischer brothers achieved under their management. The studio's ability to produce sixty to seventy pictures a year was a testament to its efficiency, but the financial troubles of the Depression years forced the company to cut back on production and release its contract players.The Antitrust And The Split
In 1940, Paramount agreed to a government-instituted consent decree that ended block booking and pre-selling, the practice of collecting up-front money for films not yet in production. Immediately, Paramount cut back on production, from seventy-one films to a more modest nineteen annually in the war years, but with more new stars like Bob Hope, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Paulette Goddard, and Betty Hutton, and with war-time attendance at astronomical numbers, Paramount and the other integrated studio-theatre combines made more money than ever. The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department decided to reopen their case against the five integrated studios, and Paramount also had a monopoly over Detroit movie theaters through its subsidiary company United Detroit Theaters. This led to the Supreme Court decision United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. in 1948, holding that movie studios could not also own movie theater chains. The decision broke up Adolph Zukor's creation, with the theater chain being split into a new company, United Paramount Theaters, and effectively brought an end to the classic Hollywood studio system. With the separation of production and exhibition forced by the U.S. Supreme Court, Paramount Pictures Inc. was split in two on the 31st of December 1949, with the one-thousand-five-hundred-screen theater chain handed to the new United Paramount Theaters. Leonard Goldenson, who had headed the chain since 1938, remained as the new company's president, and he began looking for investments. Barred from film-making by prior antitrust rulings, he acquired the struggling ABC television network in February 1953, leading it first to financial health, and eventually, in the mid-1970s, to first place in the national Nielsen ratings, before selling out to Capital Cities in 1985. The Balaban and Katz theatre division was spun off with UPT, and its trademark eventually became the property of the Balaban and Katz Historical Foundation. The foundation later acquired ownership of the Famous Players trademark, and the movie theater chain was renamed Plitt Theaters in 1977. In 1985, Cineplex Odeon Corporation merged with Plitt, and in later years, Paramount's television division would develop a strong relationship with ABC, providing many hit series to the network. Paramount Pictures had been an early backer of television, launching experimental stations in 1939 in Los Angeles and Chicago, and the Los Angeles station eventually became KTLA, the first commercial station on the West Coast. The Chicago station got a commercial license as WBKB in 1943, but was sold to UPT along with Balaban & Katz in 1948 and was eventually resold to CBS as WBBM-TV. In 1938, Paramount bought a stake in television manufacturer DuMont Laboratories, and through this stake, it became a minority owner of the DuMont Television Network. Paramount also launched its own network, Paramount Television Network, in 1948, but the FCC denied its applications for additional stations, and the company was hampered by its minority stake in the DuMont Television Network. The FCC ruled that Paramount's partial ownership of DuMont meant that DuMont and Paramount were in theory branches of the same company, and since DuMont owned three television stations and Paramount owned two, the federal agency ruled neither network could acquire additional television stations. When ABC accepted a merger offer from UPT in 1953, DuMont quickly realized that ABC now had more resources than it could possibly hope to match, and it quickly reached an agreement in principle to merge with ABC, but Paramount vetoed the offer due to antitrust concerns. For all intents and purposes, this was the end of DuMont, though it lingered on until 1956. With the loss of the theater chain, Paramount Pictures went into a decline, cutting studio-backed production, releasing its contract players, and making production deals with independents. By the mid-1950s, all the great names were gone, and only Cecil B. DeMille, associated with Paramount since 1913, kept making pictures in the grand old style. DeMille died in 1959, and like some other studios, Paramount saw little value in its film library and sold 764 of its pre-1950 films to MCA Inc./EMKA, Ltd. in February 1958.The Gulf And The Genius
By the early 1960s, Paramount's future was doubtful, and the high-risk movie business was wobbly, and the theater chain was long gone, and investments in DuMont and in early pay-television came to nothing, and the Golden Age of Hollywood had just ended. Founding father Zukor, born in 1873, was still chairman emeritus, and he referred to chairman Balaban, born in 1888, as the boy, and such aged leadership was incapable of keeping up with the changing times. In 1966, a sinking Paramount was sold to Charles Bluhdorn's industrial conglomerate, Gulf and Western Industries, and Bluhdorn immediately put his stamp on the studio, installing a virtually unknown producer named Robert Evans as head of production. Despite some rough times, Evans held the job for eight years, restoring Paramount's reputation for commercial success with movies like 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 neighboring Desilu Productions television studio, once the lot of RKO Pictures, from Lucille Ball in 1967, and using some of Desilu's established shows such as Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, and Mannix as a foot in the door at the networks, the newly reincorporated Paramount Television eventually became known as a specialist in half-hour situation comedies. In 1968, Paramount formed Films Distributing Corp to distribute sensitive film product, including Sin With a Stranger, which was one of the first films to receive an X rating in the United States when the MPAA introduced their new rating system. Robert Evans abandoned his position as head of production in 1974, and his successor, Richard Sylbert, proved to be too literary and too tasteful for Gulf and Western's Bluhdorn. By 1976, a new, television-trained team was in place headed by Barry Diller and his Killer-Dillers, as they were called by admirers or Dillettes as they were called by detractors. These associates, made up of Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dawn Steel, and Don Simpson, would each go on and head up major movie studios of their own later in their careers. The Paramount specialty was now simpler, with high concept pictures such as Saturday Night Fever and Grease hitting big, hard, and fast all over the world. Diller's television background led him to propose one of his longest-standing ideas to the board: Paramount Television Service, a fourth commercial network. Through Gulf and Western, Paramount Pictures purchased the Hughes Television Network, including its satellite time, in planning for PTVS in 1976, but Paramount sold HTN to Madison Square Garden Corporation in 1979. Diller believed strongly in the concept, and so took his fourth-network idea with him when he moved to 20th Century Fox in 1984, where Fox's then freshly installed proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, was a more interested listener. However, the television division would be playing catch-up for over a decade after Diller's departure in 1984 before launching its own television network, UPN, in 1995. Lasting eleven years before being merged with The WB network to become The CW in 2006, UPN would feature many of the shows it originally produced for other networks, and would take numerous gambles on series such as Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise. Paramount Pictures was not connected to either Paramount Records, active between 1917 and 1932, or ABC-Paramount Records, 1955-66, until it purchased the rights to use the name in the late 1960s. The Paramount name was used for soundtrack albums and some pop re-issues from the Dot Records catalog which Paramount had acquired in 1957, and by 1970, Dot had become an exclusively country music label. In 1974, Paramount sold all of its record holdings to ABC Records, which in turn was sold to MCA in 1979.The Franchise And The Fire
Paramount's successful run of pictures extended into the 1980s and 1990s, generating hits like Airplane!, American Gigolo, Ordinary People, An Officer and a Gentleman, Flashdance, Terms of Endearment, Footloose, Pretty in Pink, Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee, Fatal Attraction, Ghost, the Friday the 13th slasher series, as well as joining forces with Lucasfilm and Steven Spielberg to create the Indiana Jones franchise. Other examples are the Star Trek film series and a string of films starring comedian Eddie Murphy like Trading Places, Coming to America, and Beverly Hills Cop and its sequels. While the emphasis was decidedly on the commercial, there were occasional less commercial but more artistic and intellectual efforts like I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can, Atlantic City, Reds, Witness, Children of a Lesser God, and The Accused. During this period, responsibility for running the studio passed from Eisner and Katzenberg to Frank Mancuso, Sr. in 1984 and Ned Tanen in 1984, to Stanley R. Jaffe in 1991 and Sherry Lansing in 1992. More so than most, Paramount's slate of films included many remakes and television spin-offs, and while sometimes commercially successful, there have been few compelling films of the kind that once made Paramount the industry leader. Around the end of 1981, Paramount Pictures took over fellow Gulf and Western subsidiary Sega from the company's manufacturing division in an effort to get into the video game business, but Paramount sold Sega following the crash of 1983, and the two companies would later work together on the live action/CGI Sonic the Hedgehog film series. On the 25th of August 1983, Paramount Studios caught fire, and two or three sound stages and four outdoor sets were destroyed. When Charles Bluhdorn died unexpectedly, his successor Martin Davis dumped all of Gulf and Western's industrial, mining, and sugar-growing subsidiaries and refocused the company, renaming it Paramount Communications in 1989. With the influx of cash from the sale of Gulf and Western's industrial properties in the mid-1980s, Paramount bought a string of television stations and KECO Entertainment's theme park operations, renaming them Paramount Parks. These parks included Paramount's Great America, Paramount Canada's Wonderland, Paramount's Carowinds, Paramount's Kings Dominion, and Paramount's Kings Island. In May 1985, Paramount decided to start its own talent department, an attempt to form a stable of exclusively-contracted film personnel outside of Eddie Murphy, but this effort proved unsuccessful, and studio president Dawn Steel decided to shut down the department on the 30th of July 1986. In 1987, Paramount Pictures, MGM/UA Communications Co., and Universal Pictures teamed up in order to market feature film and television product to China, a response to the twenty-five billion admission tickets that were clocked in the country in 1986. Worldwide Media Sales, a division of the New York-based Worldwide Media Group, had been placed in charge of the undertaking. That year, Paramount Pictures decided to consolidate its distribution operations, closing a number of branch offices that were designed for the studio and relocating staff and major activities in an effort to cut costs and provide for a more efficient centralization. In August 1987, Paramount Overseas Productions declared that the subsidiary would be in service not just for the upcoming film Experts, which was shot on a budget of twelve million dollars in Canada, but also for other films filmed there worldwide, including the United Kingdom and Canada. In 1993, Sumner Redstone's entertainment conglomerate Viacom made a bid for a merger with Paramount Communications, and this quickly escalated into a bidding war with Barry Diller's QVC, but Viacom prevailed, ultimately paying ten billion dollars for the Paramount holdings. Viacom and Paramount had planned to merge as early as 1989, and in 1989, Davis renamed the company Paramount Communications Incorporated after its primary asset, Paramount Pictures. The company's ticker symbol was changed from GW to PCI, and in addition to the Paramount film, television, home video, and music publishing divisions, the company continued to own the Madison Square Garden properties, a 50% stake in USA Networks, and Simon & Schuster, Prentice Hall, Pocket Books, Allyn & Bacon, Cineamerica, and Canadian cinema chain Famous Players Theatres. That same year, the company launched a twelve-point-two billion dollar hostile bid to acquire Time Inc. in an attempt to end a stock-swap merger deal between Time and Warner Communications, but the court ruled twice in favor of Time, forcing Gulf and Western to drop both the Time acquisition and the lawsuit, and allowing the formation of Time Warner. Paramount used cash acquired from the sale of Gulf and Western's non-entertainment properties to take over the TVX Broadcast Group chain of television stations, and the KECO Entertainment chain of theme parks from Taft successor Great American Broadcasting. Both of these companies had their names changed to reflect new ownership, with TVX becoming known as the Paramount Stations Group, while KECO was renamed to Paramount Parks. Paramount Television launched Wilshire Court Productions in conjunction with USA Networks, before the latter was renamed NBCUniversal Cable, in 1989. Wilshire Court Productions, named for a side street in Los Angeles, produced television films that aired on the USA Networks, and later for other networks. USA Networks launched a second channel, the Sci-Fi Channel, in 1992, and much of the initial programming was owned either by Paramount or Universal. Paramount bought one more television station in 1993, Cox Enterprises' WKBD-TV in Detroit, Michigan, at the time an affiliate of the Fox Broadcasting Company.The Merger And The Mountain
In February 1994, Viacom acquired 50.1% of Paramount Communications Inc. shares for 9.75 billion dollars, following a five-month battle with QVC, and completed the merger in July. At the time, Paramount's holdings included Paramount Pictures, Madison Square Garden, the New York Rangers, the New York Knicks, and the Simon & Schuster publishing house. The deal had been planned as early as 1989, when the company was still known as Gulf and Western, and though Davis was named a member of the board of National Amusements, which controlled Viacom, he ceased to manage the company. During this time period, Paramount Pictures went under the guidance of chairman Jonathan Dolgen and president Sherry Lansing, and during their administration over Paramount, the studio had an extremely successful period of films with two of Paramount's ten highest-grossing films being produced during this period. The most successful of these films, Titanic, co-produced with 20th Century Fox and Lightstorm Entertainment, became the highest-grossing film up to that time, grossing over 1.8 billion dollars worldwide. Also during this time, three Paramount Pictures films won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Titanic, Braveheart, and Forrest Gump. Paramount's most important property, however, was Star Trek, and studio executives had begun to call it the franchise in the 1980s due to its reliable revenue, and other studios envied its untouchable and unduplicatable success. By 1998, Star Trek television shows, movies, books, videotapes, and licensing provided so much of the studio's profit that it is not possible to spend any reasonable amount of time at Paramount and not be aware of its presence, and filming for Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine required up to nine of the largest of the studio's 36 sound stages. In 1995, Viacom and Chris-Craft Industries' United Television launched United Paramount Network with Star Trek: Voyager as its flagship series, fulfilling Barry Diller's plan for a Paramount network from 25 years earlier. In 1999, Viacom bought out United Television's interests, and handed responsibility for the start-up network to the newly acquired CBS unit, which Viacom bought in 2000, an ironic confluence of events as Paramount had once invested in CBS, and Viacom had once been the syndication arm of CBS, as well. During this period the studio acquired some 30 television stations to support the UPN network, also acquiring and merging in the assets of Republic Pictures, Spelling Television, and Viacom Productions, almost doubling the size of the studio's television library. The television division produced the dominant prime time show for the decade in Frasier, as well as such long running hits as NCIS and Becker and the dominant prime time magazine show Entertainment Tonight. Paramount also gained the ownership rights to the Rysher library, after Viacom acquired the rights from Cox Enterprises. During this period, Paramount and its related subsidiaries and affiliates, operating under the name Viacom Entertainment Group, also included the fourth largest group of theme parks in the United States and Canada, which in addition to traditional rides and attractions launched numerous successful location-based entertainment units, including a long running Star Trek attraction at the Las Vegas Hilton. Famous Music, the company's celebrated music publishing arm, almost doubled in size and developed artists including Pink, Bush, and Green Day, as well as catalog favorites including Duke Ellington and Henry Mancini. The Paramount/Viacom licensing group under the leadership of Tom McGrath created the Cheers franchise bars and restaurants and a chain of restaurants borrowing from the studio's Academy Award-winning film Forrest Gump, The Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. Through the combined efforts of Famous Music and the studio over ten Broadway musicals were created, including Irving Berlin's White Christmas, Footloose, Saturday Night Fever, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard. The company's international arm, United International Pictures, was the dominant distributor internationally for ten straight years representing Paramount, Universal, and MGM. Simon and Schuster became part of the Viacom Entertainment Group, emerging as the United States' dominant trade book publisher. In 2002, Paramount, along with Buena Vista Distribution, 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures Entertainment, MGM/UA Entertainment, Universal Studios, DreamWorks Pictures, Artisan Entertainment, Lions Gate Entertainment, and Warner Bros. formed the Digital Cinema Initiatives, operating under a waiver from the antitrust law, the studios combined under the leadership of Paramount Chief Operating Officer Tom McGrath to develop technical standards for the eventual introduction of digital film projection. DCI was created to establish and document voluntary specifications for an open architecture for digital cinema that ensures a uniform and high level of technical performance, reliability, and quality control. McGrath also headed up Paramount's initiative for the creation and launch of the Blu-ray Disc. On the 11th of December 2005, the Paramount Motion Pictures Group announced that it had purchased DreamWorks SKG, which was co-founded by former Paramount executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, in a deal worth 1.6 billion dollars. The announcement was made by Brad Grey, chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures, who noted that enhancing Paramount's pipeline of pictures is a key strategic objective in restoring Paramount's stature as a leader in filmed entertainment. While the agreement did not include DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., the most profitable part of the company that went public the previous year, Paramount became the distributor of DreamWorks Animation films from 2006 to 2012. 20th Century Fox would take over distribution beginning in 2013 to 2017, followed by Universal Pictures permanently from 2019 following NBCUniversal's acquisition of the animated studio in 2016. Reflecting in part the troubles of the broadcasting business, in 2005 Viacom wrote off over 18 billion dollars from its radio acquisitions, and early that year, announced that it would split itself in two. With that announcement, Dolgen and Lansing were replaced by former television executives Brad Grey and Gail Berman. The Viacom board split the company into CBS Corporation and a separate company under the Viacom name, and the board scheduled the division for the first quarter of 2006. Under the plan, CBS Corporation would comprise the CBS and UPN networks, Viacom Television Stations, Infinity Broadcasting Corporation, Viacom Outdoor, Paramount Television, King World Productions, Showtime Networks, Simon & Schuster, Paramount Parks, and CBS News. The revamped Viacom would include MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, BET, and several other cable networks, as well as the Paramount movie studio. The split was completed on the 31st of December 2005, and Paramount's home entertainment unit began using the CBS DVD brand for the Paramount Television library, as both Viacom and CBS Corporation were controlled by Sumner Redstone's National Amusements. Grey also broke up the famous United International Pictures international distribution company with 15 countries being taken over by Paramount or Universal by the 31st of December 2006, with the joint venture continuing in 20 markets. In Australia, Brazil, France, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, Paramount took over UIP, while in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and Switzerland, Universal took over and Paramount would build its own distribution operations there. In 2007 and 2008, Paramount may sub-distribute films via Universal's countries and vice versa. Paramount's international distribution unit would be headquartered in Los Angeles and have a European hub. In Italy, Paramount distributed through Universal. With Universal indicated that it was pulling out of the UIP Korea and started its own operation there in November 2016, Paramount agreed to have CJ Entertainment distribute there. UIP president and chief operating officer Andrew Cripps was hired as Paramount Pictures International head. Paramount Pictures International distributed films that made the one billion mark in July 2007, the fifth studio that year to do so and its first year. On the 6th of October 2008, DreamWorks executives announced that they were leaving Paramount and relaunching an independent DreamWorks. The DreamWorks trademarks remained with DreamWorks Animation when that company was spun off before the Paramount purchase, and DreamWorks Animation transferred the license to the name to the new company. DreamWorks films, acquired by Paramount but still distributed internationally by Universal, are included in Paramount's market share. Grey also launched a Digital Entertainment division to take advantage of emerging digital distribution technologies, and this led to Paramount becoming the second movie studio to sign a deal with Apple Inc. to sell its films through the iTunes Store. Also, in 2007, Paramount sold another of its heritage units, Famous Music, to Sony/ATV Music Publishing, ending a nearly-eight-decade run as a division of Paramount, being the studio's music publishing arm since the period when the entire company went by the name Famous Players. In early 2008, Paramount partnered with Los Angeles-based developer FanRocket to make short scenes taken from its film library available to users on Facebook, and the application, called VooZoo, allows users to send movie clips to other Facebook users and to post clips on their profile pages. Paramount engineered a similar deal with Makena Technologies to allow users of vMTV and There.com to view and send movie clips. In 2009, CBS Corporation stopped using the Paramount name in its series and changed the name of the production arm to CBS Television Studios, eliminating the Paramount name from television, to distance itself from the latter. In March 2010, Paramount founded Insurge Pictures, an independent distributor of micro budget films, and the distributor planned ten movies with budgets of 100,000 dollars each. The first release was The Devil Inside, a movie with a budget of about one million dollars. In March 2015, following waning box office returns, Paramount folded Insurge Pictures and its operations into the main studio. In July 2011, in the wake of critical and box office success of the animated feature, Rango, and the departure of DreamWorks Animation upon completion of their distribution contract in 2012, Paramount announced the formation of a new division, devoted to the creation of animated productions. It marks Paramount's return to having its own animated division for the first time since 1967, when Paramount Cartoon Studios shut down. In December 2013, Walt Disney Studios, via its parent company's purchase of Lucasfilm a year earlier, gained Paramount's remaining distribution and marketing rights to future Indiana Jones films. Paramount will permanently retain the distribution rights to the first four films and will receive financial participation from any additional films. In February 2016, Viacom CEO and newly appointed chairman Philippe Dauman announced that the conglomerate was in talks to find an investor to purchase a minority stake in Paramount. Sumner Redstone and his daughter Shari were reportedly opposed to the deal. On the 13th of July 2016, Wanda Group was in talks to acquire a 49% stake of Paramount, but the talks with Wanda were dropped. On the 19th of January 2017, Shanghai Film Group Corp. and Huahua Media said they would finance at least 25% of all Paramount Pictures movies over a three-year period. Shanghai Film Group and Huahua Media, in the deal, would help distribute and market Paramount's features in China. At the time, the Wall Street Journal wrote that nearly every major Hollywood studio has a co-financing deal with a Chinese company. On the 27th of March 2017, Jim Gianopulos was named as a chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures, replacing Brad Grey. In June 2017, Paramount Players was formed by the studio with the hiring of Brian Robbins, founder of AwesomenessTV, Tollin/Robbins Productions, and Varsity Pictures, as the division's president. The division was expected to produce films based on the Viacom Media Networks properties including MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, and Comedy Central. In June 2017, Paramount Pictures signed a deal with 20th Century Fox for distribution of its films in Italy, which took effect on September. Prior to the deal, Paramount's films in Italy were distributed by Universal Pictures, a deal that dates back to the CIC era. On the 7th of December 2017, it was reported that Paramount sold the international distribution rights of Annihilation to Netflix. Netflix subsequently bought the worldwide rights to The Cloverfield Paradox for 50 million dollars. On the 16th of November 2018, Paramount signed a multi-picture film deal with Netflix as part of Viacom's growth strategy, making Paramount the first major film studio to do so. In April 2018, Paramount posted its first quarterly profit since 2015. Bob Bakish, CEO of parent Viacom, said in a statement that turnaround efforts have firmly taken hold as the studio improved margins and returned to profitability. This month's outstanding box-office performance of A Quiet Place, the first film produced and released under the new team at Paramount, is a clear sign of our progress. On the 29th of September 2016, National Amusements sent a letter to both CBS Corporation and Viacom, encouraging the two companies to merge back into one company. On the 12th of December, the deal was called off. On the 30th of May 2019, CNBC reported that CBS and Viacom would explore merger discussions in mid-June 2019. Reports say that CBS and Viacom reportedly set August 8 as an informal deadline for reaching an agreement to recombine the two media companies. CBS announced to acquire Viacom as part of the re-merger for up to 15.4 billion dollars. On the 2nd of August 2019, the two companies agreed to remerge back into one entity, which was named ViacomCBS, and the deal was closed on the 4th of December 2019. In December 2019, ViacomCBS agreed to purchase a 49% stake in Miramax that was owned by beIN Media Group, with Paramount gaining the distribution of the studio's 700-film library, as well as its future releases. The deal officially closed on the 3rd of April 2020. ViacomCBS later announced that it would rebrand the CBS All Access streaming service as Paramount+ to allow for international expansion using the widely recognized Paramount name and drawing from the studio's library, as well as that of CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, and more. Gianopulos was fired in September 2021 and replaced by Nickelodeon president Brian Robbins. In January 2022, Paramount Pictures acquired the rights to Tomi Adeyemi's young adult fantasy novel Children of Blood and Bone from Lucasfilm and 20th Century Studios. As part of the acquisition, the film will have a guaranteed exclusive theatrical release while Adeyemi will write the screenplay and serve as executive producer. The film adaptation will also be produced by Temple Hill Entertainment and Sunswept Entertainment. On the 16th of February 2022, ViacomCBS changed its name to Paramount Global, after the studio. On the 8th of March 2022, Paramount Players' operations were folded into Paramount Pictures Motion Picture Group. However, it continues to operate as a label as it has several upcoming films on its slate. On the 15th of November 2022, Paramount entered a multi-year exclusive deal with former president of DC Films Walter Hamada. Hamada oversaw the development of horror films beginning in 2023. In 2024, terms were set for the merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media, at a valuation of 28 billion dollars. Negotiations continued into 2025 among the investment teams with David Ellison, the CEO of Skydance, and Shari Redstone. In July 2025, the merger received regulatory approval, setting a path for Ellison to become CEO of Paramount. The deal closed the following month.On the 8th of May 1914, a Utah theater owner named W. W. Hodkinson sketched a mountain on a napkin during a meeting, creating the visual identity that would outlive the man himself. This simple charcoal rendering of a peak, later identified as Ben Lomond in Utah, became the foundation for the Paramount Pictures logo, a symbol that has survived over a century of corporate upheaval. The original design featured twenty-four stars surrounding the mountain, a deliberate tribute to the twenty-four actors and actresses under contract at the time. This was not merely an aesthetic choice but a declaration of power, signaling that the studio had secured the leading theatrical players of the era to produce feature-length films for the middle class. The logo evolved from a rough sketch into a matte painting by Jan Domela in 1951, and eventually into a computer-generated image of a lake and stars in 1986, yet the core image of the mountain remains the oldest surviving Hollywood film logo. The fanfare that accompanied the logo, known as Paramount on Parade, was originally sung in the 1930 film of the same name, with lyrics that read, Proud of the crowd that will never be loud, it's Paramount on Parade. This auditory signature, composed by Michael Giacchino in the modern era, continues to play before every film, connecting the current audience to the silent film days of the 1910s. The number of stars was reduced to twenty-two in 1967, and their hidden meaning was dropped, yet the mountain itself stands as a testament to the studio's longevity. Paramount Pictures is the sixth-oldest global film studio and the second-oldest in the United States, trailing only Universal Pictures, and it remains the last major film studio still headquartered in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles. The studio's physical home at 5555 Melrose Avenue has been the center of operations since 1926, when the company moved from the Lasky-DeMille Barn, a converted horse barn that served as the first production facility. The studio lot has witnessed the rise and fall of countless careers, from the silent screen to the digital age, and its backlot still features facades of New York City locales such as Washington Square and Brooklyn. The Paramount mountain is not just a logo; it is a geographical anchor for a company that has defined the American film industry for over a century.
The Mogul And The Barn
Adolph Zukor, a Hungarian-born founder who had been an early investor in nickelodeons, saw that movies appealed mainly to working-class immigrants and decided to change the game by offering feature-length films that would appeal to the middle class. His strategy was encapsulated in the slogan Famous Players in Famous Plays, which promised to bring the leading theatrical players of the time to the screen. By mid-1913, Famous Players had completed five films, and Zukor was on his way to success, but the road to dominance was paved with mergers and betrayals. In 1916, Zukor engineered a three-way merger of his Famous Players, the Lasky Company, and Paramount, buying out Hodkinson and merging the three companies into one. The new company, Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, became the largest film company at the time with a value of one hundred million dollars. Zukor believed in stars, and 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. This system gave Paramount a leading position in the 1920s and 1930s, but it also led the government to pursue the company on antitrust grounds for more than twenty years. The studio's first feature film, The Squaw Man, was released in 1914, and it was followed by a rapid expansion of production capabilities. The Lasky-DeMille Barn, a rented old horse barn converted into a production facility, was the birthplace of the studio's early success, but it was not big enough to handle all of the studio's West Coast productions by the mid-1920s. On the 5th of January 1926, Lasky reached an agreement to buy the Robert Brunton Studios, a 26-acre facility located at 5451 Marathon Street, for one million dollars. The company began an eight-month building program to renovate the existing facilities and erect new ones, and on the 8th of May 1926, Lasky finally moved operations from the Sunset and Vine lot to the new building. Zukor hired independent producer B. P. Schulberg, an unerring eye for new talent, to run the new West Coast operations, and the studio began to produce sixty to seventy pictures a year. The studio became a movie factory, turning out a steady stream of films that filled the screens of its own theater chain. The driving force behind Paramount's rise was Zukor, who built a chain of nearly 2,000 screens and ran two production studios, one in Astoria, New York, and one in Hollywood, California. He also became an early investor in radio, acquiring a 50% interest in the new Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928, selling it within a few years, but the relationship between Paramount and CBS would never fully end.
The Depression And The Code
The Great Depression brought financial ruin to Paramount, and the company filed for bankruptcy on the 14th of March 1933, after over-expansion and the use of overvalued Paramount stock for purchases created a twenty-one million dollar debt. The company remained under the control of trustees for more than a year in order to restructure the debt and pursue a reorganization plan, and on the 25th of April 1935, Federal Judge Alfred C. Coxe Jr. approved the reorganization of the Paramount-Publix Corporation under Section 77-B of the Bankruptcy Act. John E. Otterson became president of the re-emerged and newly renamed Paramount Pictures Inc., and Zukor returned to the company but was soon replaced by Y. Frank Freeman. The studio was successfully relaunched under the leadership of Barney Balaban, who was appointed president on the 2nd of July 1936, and Zukor was symbolically named chairman of the board. The studio continued to emphasize stars, and in the late 1920s and early 1930s, talkies brought in a range of powerful draws, including Richard Arlen, Nancy Carroll, Maurice Chevalier, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Charles Ruggles, Ruth Chatterton, William Powell, Mae West, Sylvia Sidney, Bing Crosby, Claudette Colbert, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Fredric March, Jack Oakie, Jeanette MacDonald, Carole Lombard, George Raft, Miriam Hopkins, Cary Grant, and Stuart Erwin. Mae West added greatly to Paramount's success with her suggestive movies She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel, but the sex appeal West gave in these movies also led to the enforcement of the Production Code, as the newly formed organization the Catholic Legion of Decency threatened a boycott if it was not enforced. Paramount cartoons produced by Fleischer Studios continued to be successful, with characters such as Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor becoming widely successful. One Fleischer series, Screen Songs, featured live-action music stars under contract to Paramount hosting sing-alongs of popular songs. The animation studio would rebound with Popeye, and in 1935, polls showed that Popeye was even more popular than Mickey Mouse. After an unsuccessful expansion into feature films, as well as the fact that Max and Dave Fleischer were no longer speaking to one another, Fleischer Studios was acquired by Paramount, which renamed the operation Famous Studios. That incarnation of the animation studio continued cartoon production until 1967, but has been historically dismissed as having largely failed to maintain the artistic acclaim the Fleischer brothers achieved under their management. The studio's ability to produce sixty to seventy pictures a year was a testament to its efficiency, but the financial troubles of the Depression years forced the company to cut back on production and release its contract players.
The Antitrust And The Split
In 1940, Paramount agreed to a government-instituted consent decree that ended block booking and pre-selling, the practice of collecting up-front money for films not yet in production. Immediately, Paramount cut back on production, from seventy-one films to a more modest nineteen annually in the war years, but with more new stars like Bob Hope, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Paulette Goddard, and Betty Hutton, and with war-time attendance at astronomical numbers, Paramount and the other integrated studio-theatre combines made more money than ever. The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department decided to reopen their case against the five integrated studios, and Paramount also had a monopoly over Detroit movie theaters through its subsidiary company United Detroit Theaters. This led to the Supreme Court decision United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. in 1948, holding that movie studios could not also own movie theater chains. The decision broke up Adolph Zukor's creation, with the theater chain being split into a new company, United Paramount Theaters, and effectively brought an end to the classic Hollywood studio system. With the separation of production and exhibition forced by the U.S. Supreme Court, Paramount Pictures Inc. was split in two on the 31st of December 1949, with the one-thousand-five-hundred-screen theater chain handed to the new United Paramount Theaters. Leonard Goldenson, who had headed the chain since 1938, remained as the new company's president, and he began looking for investments. Barred from film-making by prior antitrust rulings, he acquired the struggling ABC television network in February 1953, leading it first to financial health, and eventually, in the mid-1970s, to first place in the national Nielsen ratings, before selling out to Capital Cities in 1985. The Balaban and Katz theatre division was spun off with UPT, and its trademark eventually became the property of the Balaban and Katz Historical Foundation. The foundation later acquired ownership of the Famous Players trademark, and the movie theater chain was renamed Plitt Theaters in 1977. In 1985, Cineplex Odeon Corporation merged with Plitt, and in later years, Paramount's television division would develop a strong relationship with ABC, providing many hit series to the network. Paramount Pictures had been an early backer of television, launching experimental stations in 1939 in Los Angeles and Chicago, and the Los Angeles station eventually became KTLA, the first commercial station on the West Coast. The Chicago station got a commercial license as WBKB in 1943, but was sold to UPT along with Balaban & Katz in 1948 and was eventually resold to CBS as WBBM-TV. In 1938, Paramount bought a stake in television manufacturer DuMont Laboratories, and through this stake, it became a minority owner of the DuMont Television Network. Paramount also launched its own network, Paramount Television Network, in 1948, but the FCC denied its applications for additional stations, and the company was hampered by its minority stake in the DuMont Television Network. The FCC ruled that Paramount's partial ownership of DuMont meant that DuMont and Paramount were in theory branches of the same company, and since DuMont owned three television stations and Paramount owned two, the federal agency ruled neither network could acquire additional television stations. When ABC accepted a merger offer from UPT in 1953, DuMont quickly realized that ABC now had more resources than it could possibly hope to match, and it quickly reached an agreement in principle to merge with ABC, but Paramount vetoed the offer due to antitrust concerns. For all intents and purposes, this was the end of DuMont, though it lingered on until 1956. With the loss of the theater chain, Paramount Pictures went into a decline, cutting studio-backed production, releasing its contract players, and making production deals with independents. By the mid-1950s, all the great names were gone, and only Cecil B. DeMille, associated with Paramount since 1913, kept making pictures in the grand old style. DeMille died in 1959, and like some other studios, Paramount saw little value in its film library and sold 764 of its pre-1950 films to MCA Inc./EMKA, Ltd. in February 1958.
The Gulf And The Genius
By the early 1960s, Paramount's future was doubtful, and the high-risk movie business was wobbly, and the theater chain was long gone, and investments in DuMont and in early pay-television came to nothing, and the Golden Age of Hollywood had just ended. Founding father Zukor, born in 1873, was still chairman emeritus, and he referred to chairman Balaban, born in 1888, as the boy, and such aged leadership was incapable of keeping up with the changing times. In 1966, a sinking Paramount was sold to Charles Bluhdorn's industrial conglomerate, Gulf and Western Industries, and Bluhdorn immediately put his stamp on the studio, installing a virtually unknown producer named Robert Evans as head of production. Despite some rough times, Evans held the job for eight years, restoring Paramount's reputation for commercial success with movies like 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 neighboring Desilu Productions television studio, once the lot of RKO Pictures, from Lucille Ball in 1967, and using some of Desilu's established shows such as Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, and Mannix as a foot in the door at the networks, the newly reincorporated Paramount Television eventually became known as a specialist in half-hour situation comedies. In 1968, Paramount formed Films Distributing Corp to distribute sensitive film product, including Sin With a Stranger, which was one of the first films to receive an X rating in the United States when the MPAA introduced their new rating system. Robert Evans abandoned his position as head of production in 1974, and his successor, Richard Sylbert, proved to be too literary and too tasteful for Gulf and Western's Bluhdorn. By 1976, a new, television-trained team was in place headed by Barry Diller and his Killer-Dillers, as they were called by admirers or Dillettes as they were called by detractors. These associates, made up of Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dawn Steel, and Don Simpson, would each go on and head up major movie studios of their own later in their careers. The Paramount specialty was now simpler, with high concept pictures such as Saturday Night Fever and Grease hitting big, hard, and fast all over the world. Diller's television background led him to propose one of his longest-standing ideas to the board: Paramount Television Service, a fourth commercial network. Through Gulf and Western, Paramount Pictures purchased the Hughes Television Network, including its satellite time, in planning for PTVS in 1976, but Paramount sold HTN to Madison Square Garden Corporation in 1979. Diller believed strongly in the concept, and so took his fourth-network idea with him when he moved to 20th Century Fox in 1984, where Fox's then freshly installed proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, was a more interested listener. However, the television division would be playing catch-up for over a decade after Diller's departure in 1984 before launching its own television network, UPN, in 1995. Lasting eleven years before being merged with The WB network to become The CW in 2006, UPN would feature many of the shows it originally produced for other networks, and would take numerous gambles on series such as Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise. Paramount Pictures was not connected to either Paramount Records, active between 1917 and 1932, or ABC-Paramount Records, 1955-66, until it purchased the rights to use the name in the late 1960s. The Paramount name was used for soundtrack albums and some pop re-issues from the Dot Records catalog which Paramount had acquired in 1957, and by 1970, Dot had become an exclusively country music label. In 1974, Paramount sold all of its record holdings to ABC Records, which in turn was sold to MCA in 1979.
The Franchise And The Fire
Paramount's successful run of pictures extended into the 1980s and 1990s, generating hits like Airplane!, American Gigolo, Ordinary People, An Officer and a Gentleman, Flashdance, Terms of Endearment, Footloose, Pretty in Pink, Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee, Fatal Attraction, Ghost, the Friday the 13th slasher series, as well as joining forces with Lucasfilm and Steven Spielberg to create the Indiana Jones franchise. Other examples are the Star Trek film series and a string of films starring comedian Eddie Murphy like Trading Places, Coming to America, and Beverly Hills Cop and its sequels. While the emphasis was decidedly on the commercial, there were occasional less commercial but more artistic and intellectual efforts like I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can, Atlantic City, Reds, Witness, Children of a Lesser God, and The Accused. During this period, responsibility for running the studio passed from Eisner and Katzenberg to Frank Mancuso, Sr. in 1984 and Ned Tanen in 1984, to Stanley R. Jaffe in 1991 and Sherry Lansing in 1992. More so than most, Paramount's slate of films included many remakes and television spin-offs, and while sometimes commercially successful, there have been few compelling films of the kind that once made Paramount the industry leader. Around the end of 1981, Paramount Pictures took over fellow Gulf and Western subsidiary Sega from the company's manufacturing division in an effort to get into the video game business, but Paramount sold Sega following the crash of 1983, and the two companies would later work together on the live action/CGI Sonic the Hedgehog film series. On the 25th of August 1983, Paramount Studios caught fire, and two or three sound stages and four outdoor sets were destroyed. When Charles Bluhdorn died unexpectedly, his successor Martin Davis dumped all of Gulf and Western's industrial, mining, and sugar-growing subsidiaries and refocused the company, renaming it Paramount Communications in 1989. With the influx of cash from the sale of Gulf and Western's industrial properties in the mid-1980s, Paramount bought a string of television stations and KECO Entertainment's theme park operations, renaming them Paramount Parks. These parks included Paramount's Great America, Paramount Canada's Wonderland, Paramount's Carowinds, Paramount's Kings Dominion, and Paramount's Kings Island. In May 1985, Paramount decided to start its own talent department, an attempt to form a stable of exclusively-contracted film personnel outside of Eddie Murphy, but this effort proved unsuccessful, and studio president Dawn Steel decided to shut down the department on the 30th of July 1986. In 1987, Paramount Pictures, MGM/UA Communications Co., and Universal Pictures teamed up in order to market feature film and television product to China, a response to the twenty-five billion admission tickets that were clocked in the country in 1986. Worldwide Media Sales, a division of the New York-based Worldwide Media Group, had been placed in charge of the undertaking. That year, Paramount Pictures decided to consolidate its distribution operations, closing a number of branch offices that were designed for the studio and relocating staff and major activities in an effort to cut costs and provide for a more efficient centralization. In August 1987, Paramount Overseas Productions declared that the subsidiary would be in service not just for the upcoming film Experts, which was shot on a budget of twelve million dollars in Canada, but also for other films filmed there worldwide, including the United Kingdom and Canada. In 1993, Sumner Redstone's entertainment conglomerate Viacom made a bid for a merger with Paramount Communications, and this quickly escalated into a bidding war with Barry Diller's QVC, but Viacom prevailed, ultimately paying ten billion dollars for the Paramount holdings. Viacom and Paramount had planned to merge as early as 1989, and in 1989, Davis renamed the company Paramount Communications Incorporated after its primary asset, Paramount Pictures. The company's ticker symbol was changed from GW to PCI, and in addition to the Paramount film, television, home video, and music publishing divisions, the company continued to own the Madison Square Garden properties, a 50% stake in USA Networks, and Simon & Schuster, Prentice Hall, Pocket Books, Allyn & Bacon, Cineamerica, and Canadian cinema chain Famous Players Theatres. That same year, the company launched a twelve-point-two billion dollar hostile bid to acquire Time Inc. in an attempt to end a stock-swap merger deal between Time and Warner Communications, but the court ruled twice in favor of Time, forcing Gulf and Western to drop both the Time acquisition and the lawsuit, and allowing the formation of Time Warner. Paramount used cash acquired from the sale of Gulf and Western's non-entertainment properties to take over the TVX Broadcast Group chain of television stations, and the KECO Entertainment chain of theme parks from Taft successor Great American Broadcasting. Both of these companies had their names changed to reflect new ownership, with TVX becoming known as the Paramount Stations Group, while KECO was renamed to Paramount Parks. Paramount Television launched Wilshire Court Productions in conjunction with USA Networks, before the latter was renamed NBCUniversal Cable, in 1989. Wilshire Court Productions, named for a side street in Los Angeles, produced television films that aired on the USA Networks, and later for other networks. USA Networks launched a second channel, the Sci-Fi Channel, in 1992, and much of the initial programming was owned either by Paramount or Universal. Paramount bought one more television station in 1993, Cox Enterprises' WKBD-TV in Detroit, Michigan, at the time an affiliate of the Fox Broadcasting Company.
The Merger And The Mountain
In February 1994, Viacom acquired 50.1% of Paramount Communications Inc. shares for 9.75 billion dollars, following a five-month battle with QVC, and completed the merger in July. At the time, Paramount's holdings included Paramount Pictures, Madison Square Garden, the New York Rangers, the New York Knicks, and the Simon & Schuster publishing house. The deal had been planned as early as 1989, when the company was still known as Gulf and Western, and though Davis was named a member of the board of National Amusements, which controlled Viacom, he ceased to manage the company. During this time period, Paramount Pictures went under the guidance of chairman Jonathan Dolgen and president Sherry Lansing, and during their administration over Paramount, the studio had an extremely successful period of films with two of Paramount's ten highest-grossing films being produced during this period. The most successful of these films, Titanic, co-produced with 20th Century Fox and Lightstorm Entertainment, became the highest-grossing film up to that time, grossing over 1.8 billion dollars worldwide. Also during this time, three Paramount Pictures films won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Titanic, Braveheart, and Forrest Gump. Paramount's most important property, however, was Star Trek, and studio executives had begun to call it the franchise in the 1980s due to its reliable revenue, and other studios envied its untouchable and unduplicatable success. By 1998, Star Trek television shows, movies, books, videotapes, and licensing provided so much of the studio's profit that it is not possible to spend any reasonable amount of time at Paramount and not be aware of its presence, and filming for Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine required up to nine of the largest of the studio's 36 sound stages. In 1995, Viacom and Chris-Craft Industries' United Television launched United Paramount Network with Star Trek: Voyager as its flagship series, fulfilling Barry Diller's plan for a Paramount network from 25 years earlier. In 1999, Viacom bought out United Television's interests, and handed responsibility for the start-up network to the newly acquired CBS unit, which Viacom bought in 2000, an ironic confluence of events as Paramount had once invested in CBS, and Viacom had once been the syndication arm of CBS, as well. During this period the studio acquired some 30 television stations to support the UPN network, also acquiring and merging in the assets of Republic Pictures, Spelling Television, and Viacom Productions, almost doubling the size of the studio's television library. The television division produced the dominant prime time show for the decade in Frasier, as well as such long running hits as NCIS and Becker and the dominant prime time magazine show Entertainment Tonight. Paramount also gained the ownership rights to the Rysher library, after Viacom acquired the rights from Cox Enterprises. During this period, Paramount and its related subsidiaries and affiliates, operating under the name Viacom Entertainment Group, also included the fourth largest group of theme parks in the United States and Canada, which in addition to traditional rides and attractions launched numerous successful location-based entertainment units, including a long running Star Trek attraction at the Las Vegas Hilton. Famous Music, the company's celebrated music publishing arm, almost doubled in size and developed artists including Pink, Bush, and Green Day, as well as catalog favorites including Duke Ellington and Henry Mancini. The Paramount/Viacom licensing group under the leadership of Tom McGrath created the Cheers franchise bars and restaurants and a chain of restaurants borrowing from the studio's Academy Award-winning film Forrest Gump, The Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. Through the combined efforts of Famous Music and the studio over ten Broadway musicals were created, including Irving Berlin's White Christmas, Footloose, Saturday Night Fever, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard. The company's international arm, United International Pictures, was the dominant distributor internationally for ten straight years representing Paramount, Universal, and MGM. Simon and Schuster became part of the Viacom Entertainment Group, emerging as the United States' dominant trade book publisher. In 2002, Paramount, along with Buena Vista Distribution, 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures Entertainment, MGM/UA Entertainment, Universal Studios, DreamWorks Pictures, Artisan Entertainment, Lions Gate Entertainment, and Warner Bros. formed the Digital Cinema Initiatives, operating under a waiver from the antitrust law, the studios combined under the leadership of Paramount Chief Operating Officer Tom McGrath to develop technical standards for the eventual introduction of digital film projection. DCI was created to establish and document voluntary specifications for an open architecture for digital cinema that ensures a uniform and high level of technical performance, reliability, and quality control. McGrath also headed up Paramount's initiative for the creation and launch of the Blu-ray Disc. On the 11th of December 2005, the Paramount Motion Pictures Group announced that it had purchased DreamWorks SKG, which was co-founded by former Paramount executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, in a deal worth 1.6 billion dollars. The announcement was made by Brad Grey, chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures, who noted that enhancing Paramount's pipeline of pictures is a key strategic objective in restoring Paramount's stature as a leader in filmed entertainment. While the agreement did not include DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc., the most profitable part of the company that went public the previous year, Paramount became the distributor of DreamWorks Animation films from 2006 to 2012. 20th Century Fox would take over distribution beginning in 2013 to 2017, followed by Universal Pictures permanently from 2019 following NBCUniversal's acquisition of the animated studio in 2016. Reflecting in part the troubles of the broadcasting business, in 2005 Viacom wrote off over 18 billion dollars from its radio acquisitions, and early that year, announced that it would split itself in two. With that announcement, Dolgen and Lansing were replaced by former television executives Brad Grey and Gail Berman. The Viacom board split the company into CBS Corporation and a separate company under the Viacom name, and the board scheduled the division for the first quarter of 2006. Under the plan, CBS Corporation would comprise the CBS and UPN networks, Viacom Television Stations, Infinity Broadcasting Corporation, Viacom Outdoor, Paramount Television, King World Productions, Showtime Networks, Simon & Schuster, Paramount Parks, and CBS News. The revamped Viacom would include MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, BET, and several other cable networks, as well as the Paramount movie studio. The split was completed on the 31st of December 2005, and Paramount's home entertainment unit began using the CBS DVD brand for the Paramount Television library, as both Viacom and CBS Corporation were controlled by Sumner Redstone's National Amusements. Grey also broke up the famous United International Pictures international distribution company with 15 countries being taken over by Paramount or Universal by the 31st of December 2006, with the joint venture continuing in 20 markets. In Australia, Brazil, France, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, Paramount took over UIP, while in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and Switzerland, Universal took over and Paramount would build its own distribution operations there. In 2007 and 2008, Paramount may sub-distribute films via Universal's countries and vice versa. Paramount's international distribution unit would be headquartered in Los Angeles and have a European hub. In Italy, Paramount distributed through Universal. With Universal indicated that it was pulling out of the UIP Korea and started its own operation there in November 2016, Paramount agreed to have CJ Entertainment distribute there. UIP president and chief operating officer Andrew Cripps was hired as Paramount Pictures International head. Paramount Pictures International distributed films that made the one billion mark in July 2007, the fifth studio that year to do so and its first year. On the 6th of October 2008, DreamWorks executives announced that they were leaving Paramount and relaunching an independent DreamWorks. The DreamWorks trademarks remained with DreamWorks Animation when that company was spun off before the Paramount purchase, and DreamWorks Animation transferred the license to the name to the new company. DreamWorks films, acquired by Paramount but still distributed internationally by Universal, are included in Paramount's market share. Grey also launched a Digital Entertainment division to take advantage of emerging digital distribution technologies, and this led to Paramount becoming the second movie studio to sign a deal with Apple Inc. to sell its films through the iTunes Store. Also, in 2007, Paramount sold another of its heritage units, Famous Music, to Sony/ATV Music Publishing, ending a nearly-eight-decade run as a division of Paramount, being the studio's music publishing arm since the period when the entire company went by the name Famous Players. In early 2008, Paramount partnered with Los Angeles-based developer FanRocket to make short scenes taken from its film library available to users on Facebook, and the application, called VooZoo, allows users to send movie clips to other Facebook users and to post clips on their profile pages. Paramount engineered a similar deal with Makena Technologies to allow users of vMTV and There.com to view and send movie clips. In 2009, CBS Corporation stopped using the Paramount name in its series and changed the name of the production arm to CBS Television Studios, eliminating the Paramount name from television, to distance itself from the latter. In March 2010, Paramount founded Insurge Pictures, an independent distributor of micro budget films, and the distributor planned ten movies with budgets of 100,000 dollars each. The first release was The Devil Inside, a movie with a budget of about one million dollars. In March 2015, following waning box office returns, Paramount folded Insurge Pictures and its operations into the main studio. In July 2011, in the wake of critical and box office success of the animated feature, Rango, and the departure of DreamWorks Animation upon completion of their distribution contract in 2012, Paramount announced the formation of a new division, devoted to the creation of animated productions. It marks Paramount's return to having its own animated division for the first time since 1967, when Paramount Cartoon Studios shut down. In December 2013, Walt Disney Studios, via its parent company's purchase of Lucasfilm a year earlier, gained Paramount's remaining distribution and marketing rights to future Indiana Jones films. Paramount will permanently retain the distribution rights to the first four films and will receive financial participation from any additional films. In February 2016, Viacom CEO and newly appointed chairman Philippe Dauman announced that the conglomerate was in talks to find an investor to purchase a minority stake in Paramount. Sumner Redstone and his daughter Shari were reportedly opposed to the deal. On the 13th of July 2016, Wanda Group was in talks to acquire a 49% stake of Paramount, but the talks with Wanda were dropped. On the 19th of January 2017, Shanghai Film Group Corp. and Huahua Media said they would finance at least 25% of all Paramount Pictures movies over a three-year period. Shanghai Film Group and Huahua Media, in the deal, would help distribute and market Paramount's features in China. At the time, the Wall Street Journal wrote that nearly every major Hollywood studio has a co-financing deal with a Chinese company. On the 27th of March 2017, Jim Gianopulos was named as a chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures, replacing Brad Grey. In June 2017, Paramount Players was formed by the studio with the hiring of Brian Robbins, founder of AwesomenessTV, Tollin/Robbins Productions, and Varsity Pictures, as the division's president. The division was expected to produce films based on the Viacom Media Networks properties including MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, and Comedy Central. In June 2017, Paramount Pictures signed a deal with 20th Century Fox for distribution of its films in Italy, which took effect on September. Prior to the deal, Paramount's films in Italy were distributed by Universal Pictures, a deal that dates back to the CIC era. On the 7th of December 2017, it was reported that Paramount sold the international distribution rights of Annihilation to Netflix. Netflix subsequently bought the worldwide rights to The Cloverfield Paradox for 50 million dollars. On the 16th of November 2018, Paramount signed a multi-picture film deal with Netflix as part of Viacom's growth strategy, making Paramount the first major film studio to do so. In April 2018, Paramount posted its first quarterly profit since 2015. Bob Bakish, CEO of parent Viacom, said in a statement that turnaround efforts have firmly taken hold as the studio improved margins and returned to profitability. This month's outstanding box-office performance of A Quiet Place, the first film produced and released under the new team at Paramount, is a clear sign of our progress. On the 29th of September 2016, National Amusements sent a letter to both CBS Corporation and Viacom, encouraging the two companies to merge back into one company. On the 12th of December, the deal was called off. On the 30th of May 2019, CNBC reported that CBS and Viacom would explore merger discussions in mid-June 2019. Reports say that CBS and Viacom reportedly set August 8 as an informal deadline for reaching an agreement to recombine the two media companies. CBS announced to acquire Viacom as part of the re-merger for up to 15.4 billion dollars. On the 2nd of August 2019, the two companies agreed to remerge back into one entity, which was named ViacomCBS, and the deal was closed on the 4th of December 2019. In December 2019, ViacomCBS agreed to purchase a 49% stake in Miramax that was owned by beIN Media Group, with Paramount gaining the distribution of the studio's 700-film library, as well as its future releases. The deal officially closed on the 3rd of April 2020. ViacomCBS later announced that it would rebrand the CBS All Access streaming service as Paramount+ to allow for international expansion using the widely recognized Paramount name and drawing from the studio's library, as well as that of CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, and more. Gianopulos was fired in September 2021 and replaced by Nickelodeon president Brian Robbins. In January 2022, Paramount Pictures acquired the rights to Tomi Adeyemi's young adult fantasy novel Children of Blood and Bone from Lucasfilm and 20th Century Studios. As part of the acquisition, the film will have a guaranteed exclusive theatrical release while Adeyemi will write the screenplay and serve as executive producer. The film adaptation will also be produced by Temple Hill Entertainment and Sunswept Entertainment. On the 16th of February 2022, ViacomCBS changed its name to Paramount Global, after the studio. On the 8th of March 2022, Paramount Players' operations were folded into Paramount Pictures Motion Picture Group. However, it continues to operate as a label as it has several upcoming films on its slate. On the 15th of November 2022, Paramount entered a multi-year exclusive deal with former president of DC Films Walter Hamada. Hamada oversaw the development of horror films beginning in 2023. In 2024, terms were set for the merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media, at a valuation of 28 billion dollars. Negotiations continued into 2025 among the investment teams with David Ellison, the CEO of Skydance, and Shari Redstone. In July 2025, the merger received regulatory approval, setting a path for Ellison to become CEO of Paramount. The deal closed the following month.