New Line Cinema
From the One Wiki to Rule Them All, the Lord of the Rings Encyclopedia.
New Line Cinema is the company which produced The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Was founded in 1967 and is one of the major American film studios. It started as an independent institution but became a subsidiary of Time Warner and is now part of Warner Brothers.
One of the company's early successes was its distribution of the 1936 anti-Cannabis propaganda film Reefer Madness, which became a cult hit on American college campuses in the early 1970s. The studio has also released many of the films of John Waters (not including Cry-Baby which was released by Universal Pictures and Serial Mom, which was produced by Savoy Pictures). A Nightmare on Elm Street was New Line's first commercially successful series after a devastating financial slump, leading the company to be nicknamed "The House that Freddy Built". New Line also released many classic foreign-language films, like Stay as you are, Immoral Tales and Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (which became the first New Line film to win an Oscar). In 1993, New Line Cinema was acquired by Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting System, which then merged with Time Warner in 1996. While fellow Turner-owned studios Hanna-Barbera Productions and Castle Rock Entertainment eventually became absorbed into Warner Bros. New Line was kept as its own entity until February 28, 2008 when Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes announced that New Line would shut down as a privately held studio. Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne said that they would step down with a letter to their employees. They promised, however, along with Time Warner and Jeffery Bewkes that the company would continue to operate its financing, producing, marketing and distributing operations of its own films with the New Line logo, but would do so now as a part of Warner Bros. and be a smaller studio, releasing a smaller number of films than in past years. As to the company's future, according to Warner Bros. president Alan Horn, "There's no budget number required. They'll be doing about six per year, though the number may go from four to seven; it's not going to be 10." As to content, "New Line will not just be doing genre... There's no mandate to make a particular kind of movie." In 2007, New Line Cinema and Castle Rock Entertainment collaborated on Fracture, their first joint venture since the mid-1990s before both companies were bought by Turner.
Outside the U.S., New Line does not distribute its own films. Rather, it contracts other studios such as Alliance in Canada, Entertainment Film Distributors in the UK, Warner Bros. in German-speaking areas, Singapore, Poland, and the Czech Republic, Village Roadshow Pictures in Australia and New Zealand, Playarte in Brazil, Cine Colombia in Colombia, Metropolitan Filmexport in France and AB Svensk Filmindustri (also known as SF-Film) in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and CineStar Films of the Philippines to distribute its product overseas. International distribution of New Line films will revert to Warner Bros. after third-party distribution contracts expire (no timeframe has been set for this yet). The first expiration will be Village Roadshow as overall Australian distributor, they will remain as theatrical distributor (as they have theatrical rights to WB films there), but WB will handle DVD releases.
