Talking About the Disney/21st Century Fox Deal: Does Disney Own the Movie 'Titanic' Now?

-

Does Disney own the movie Titanic now?
James Cameron’s 1997 film was the most expensive motion picture of its day; its unprecedented $200 million budget was so large that Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment had to team up with two major studios to get his film made and distributed.
The two studios that stepped up to the plate were Paramount Pictures (a subsidiary of Viacom) and 20th Century Fox Film Corporation (a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation).
Though it might seem strange that two rival studios would join forces to produce and release a major motion picture, it has happened several times, most notably when Universal Pictures and Columbia Pictures bankrolled Steven Spielberg’s 1941 back in the late 1970s.
What usually happens in these deals is that one studio gets the rights for domestic distribution, while the other gets the foreign distribution rights. In the case of Titanic, Paramount Pictures got dibs on the lucrative North American market, while 20th Century Fox distributed the film overseas.
The same deal applies for the home media release; when I bought my VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray releases of Titanic, I noticed that the packaging emphasized its status as a Paramount Home Entertainment release. 20th Century Fox and Lightstorm Entertainment get mentioned in the copyright fine print, but it’s the Paramount logo that appears on the spine of the packaging.
Before March 20, 2019, 20th Century Fox (at the time, part of Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, the company purchased by Disney) still owned the foreign rights to Titanic. After that date, Fox’s ownership of those rights was inherited by its 21st Century Fox’s parent, The Walt Disney Company.
As far as I know, though, the domestic rights are still owned by Paramount Pictures and Viacom.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year 1958, which is where parts of  11/22/63 
Read more

Talking About Tom Clancy's 'Ryanverse': Was Jack Ryan a Republican or a Democrat?

-
Image
Harrison Ford starred in two Jack Ryan films. © 1992 Paramount Pictures On Quora, member Maya Lachman asks: Was Jack Ryan a Republican or a Democrat? My reply: If you’re talking about Tom Clancy’s iconic character John Patrick Ryan, Sr., he is depicted in the novels as being Republican, especially in most of the books that follow 1991’s  The Sum of All Fears. In the early Jack Ryan novels ( The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, The Cardinal of the Cardinal, Clear and Present Danger,  and  The Sum of All Fears ), Ryan works his way up the ranks in the Central Intelligence Agency, starting out as a recently-recruited analyst and rising all the way to Deputy Director (Intelligence), or DDI. During his time at CIA, Ryan doesn’t have much to say about politics (except in the context of U.S.-Soviet relations, in which case he is obviously a Cold War Republican), but his pre-CIA resume includes a stint as a Marine Corps lieutenant, a successful stockbroker who, despite
Read more

Movie Review: 'PT-109'

-
Image
In June of 1963, five months before the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Warner Bros. released director Leslie Martinson’s  PT-109 , an adaptation of Robert J. Donovan’s non-fiction book  PT-109: John F. Kennedy in World War II.   Starring Cliff Robertson ( Charly, Spider-Man ) as Navy Lieutenant (junior grade) John F. Kennedy and co-starring Ty Hardin, James Gregory, Robert Culp, Robert Blake, Norman Fell and even an uncredited George Takei (Hikaru Sulu of  Star Trek: The Original Series ), the film is a fairly accurate depiction of JFK’s naval service in the South Pacific as the commander of a motor torpedo boat given the Navy pennant number PT-109 (the PT standing for the Navy ship designator “Patrol Torpedo”).  Although Hollywood had made movies in which former Presidents (either living or dead) were depicted, producer Bryan Foy, under the direct guidance of Warner Bros.' head of production Jack Warner (who, in turn, was influenced by Joseph P. Kennedy, a f
Read more