TriStar Pictures
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TriStar Pictures, Inc. (spelled Tri-Star until 1991) is a Film subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, itself a subdivision of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, which is owned by Sony Pictures. It was founded in 1982.
The concept for TriStar came about in 1982 when Columbia (then a subsidiary of Coca-Cola), HBO, and CBS decided to pool resources to split the ever-growing costs of making movies. Their first release, in 1984, was The Natural. Their second movie was a flop remake of the 1960 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture Where the Boys Are.
CBS dropped out of the venture in 1984. In April 1987, Tri-Star entered into the television business as TriStar Television. In December 1987, HBO dropped out of the Tri-Star venture and Columbia Pictures bought their venture shares and merged Columbia and Tri-Star into Columbia Pictures Entertainment. Both companies continued to produce and distribute films under their separate names.
In 1989, all of Coke's entertainment holdings were acquired by Sony Corporation of Japan, who merged Columbia and TriStar, but continued to use the separate names. Sony Pictures Entertainment later revived TriStar Television as a television production banner in 1991 and co-launched Columbia TriStar Television in 1994 with its sister television studio Columbia Pictures Television. Around summer 1998, Sony Pictures Entertainment merged Columbia and TriStar to form Columbia TriStar Pictures (or Columbia TriStar Entertainment, Inc.) but just like Columbia Pictures Entertainment, both divisions continued producing and distributing films under their own names.
TriStar was relaunched in 2004 as a marketing and acquisitions unit that will have a "particular emphasis on genre films". [1]
TriStar was the theatrical distributor for many films produced by Carolco Pictures (the rights to only one of their films, Cliffhanger, has been retained by TriStar).
