Founded in 1994, Dreamworks is a private entertainment and film-production company launched by entertainment stalwarts- Steven Spielberg- best known for his movies Jurassic park, Schinder’s list, etc., David Geffan- renowned Producer and business magnet of America, and Jeffrey Katzenberg- one of the famous film producers and media personalities of the US. Started off as an entertainment live-action studio for films, Dreamworks is known to be one of the successful film studios of those times by grossing more than 100 million USD per each movie produced distributed.
In the times when Walt Disney Company- the revolutionary Animated company of 2000s, was winning the box office race by producing artistic animated films of the era, DreamWorks produced a computer-animated film Shrek, which is one of the best grossed feature films of 2001. DreamWorks was renamed as DreamWorks SKG, named after the founding trio- Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffan. The film production company has grown quite popular in Hollywood within no time and produced some of the classic live-action and animated films.
In their later ventures, the trio brought each of their expertise under one roof. Katzenberg who formerly served as the Chairperson of Walt Disney Studios and known for his direction marvel- Beauty and the Beast- led animation movies under DreamWorks.
David Geffan, known for his music business- the Geffen Records- one of the path-breaking record labels of 1980, tailored music label launched under the names SKG Music and DreamWorks Records . Steven Spielberg, with his passion for film-making and creating masterpieces, continued his journey of live-action film-making with more budget and technical investment.
DreamWorks Interactive, the Microsoft-funded interactive gaming venture was one of the promising investment projects that DreamWorks signed in collaboration with a technology giant in 1995. During the period between 1994 to 1997, the company went through a roller-coaster of exciting ups and disappointing downs.
Their first film project- The Peacemaker didn’t reach the expected all-hailed success. But in their later stint, they produced some of the blockbusters like Mouse Hunt, Amistad, and Deep Impact, etc.,- the successes that placed DreamWorks back in the game. While the cinema venture was delivering promising results, SKG Records- the subsidiary of DreamWorks music venture, started off with quite a big buzz by bagging prominent awards like Boston Music Awards for their successful and popular record labels.
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Who owns DreamWorks
Fast forward to 2005, the founders decided to sell the live-action studio to original Viacom with an agreement of continuing the original production name. A year later, the deal was closed; by then Paramount (the then parent company of original Viacom) planned to license the music label to Sony Music.
Although Paramount retained the distribution rights and production label, they sold the controlling rights of live-action studio to Dune entertainment. After a series of mergers and acquisitions, in the year 2008, DreamWorks ended its deal with Paramount and raised 1.2 billion USD in a deal with Reliance (Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group) for setting up a stand alone production company of its own.
After a brief period of time, in 2009, Walt Disney Pictures agreed to sign a long-term deal where 30 films produced by DreamWorks films would be released in the banner of Touchstone pictures and Disney would get a 10% of distribution amount. Along with this deal, DreamWorks also took a loan of about 175 million USD from Disney and also got production access slots with Disney.
After cutting ties with Universal studios, DreamWorks again raised funding of 325 million USD from Reliance. Thereafter, in the month of August DreamWorks and Reliance signed a deal worth 825 million USD which is a pact for producing 6 movies per the contractual year. The partnership with Reliance continued until 2012 where the company invested around 200 million USD after DreamWorks’ continued to produce many projects back to back.
Through this funding, DreamWorks again bounced back and went on to shoot big budget movies with 20th Century Fox as their financial partner. In the same year, they negotiated to extend their deal with Disney for distributing their films in some parts of the world.
DreamWorks started negotiating with Universal Studios in September 2015- just ahead of the Disney-DreamWorks deal expiry. Disney retained the production and distribution rights of fourteen films and further acquired the copyright of DreamWorks distribution name.
Wrapping Up
At the end of 2015, Speilberg collaborated with Participant media, Entertainment One, and Reliance to launch a brand new content production company. Amblin Partners, the production company made a deal with Universal studios to distribute the films produced by Amblin Partners for five years. Currently DreamWorks is under the joint-venture agreement of Amblin Partners.
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