WARNER BROS

WOULD HAVE SEEN THIS LOGO A LOT WHILE SEEING MOVIES BUT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS?

Then here is something that will tell you about this institution.

Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., formerly known

as Warner Bros. Studios, commonly referred to as Warner Bros or Warner Brothers.  Warner Bro’s is an American producer of film, television, and music entertainment.

One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank, California and New York. Warner bros has several subsidiary companies, including Warner Bros. Studios, Warner Bros. Pictures, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Warner Bros. Television, Warner Bros. Animation, Warner Home Video, New Line Cinema, TheWB.com and DC Entertainment.

Warner Bros. is a member of the Motion Picture Association of America.

WHO FOUNDED WARNER BRO’S?

The company was founded by four brothers, Harry, Albert, Samuel and Jack Warner, who were the sons of Benjamin Eichelbaum, an immigrant polish cobbler and peddler. The brothers began their careers showing moving pictures in Ohio and Pennsylvania on a travelling basis. Beginning in 1903 they started acquiring movie theatres, and then moved into film distribution. In about 1913 they began producing there own films, and in 1917 they shifted their production headquarters to Hollywood, Calif. They established WARNER BRO’S PICTURES, INC., in 1923.The oldest of the brothers; Harry was the president of the company and ran its headquarters in New York City, while Albert was its treasurer and head of sales and distribution. Sam and Jack managed the studio in Hollywood.

When the company ran into financial difficulties in the mid-1920s, Sam Warner persuaded his brothers to collaborate in developing a patent on a process (Vita phone) that made the “talkies” possible. The studio’s Don Juan (1926) opened with a completely synchronized musical sound track, and The Jazz Singer (1927) had both synchronized music and dialogue. (Sam died only 24 hours before the latter’s premiere.) Warner Brothers then made Lights of New York (1928), the first full-length all-talking film, and On with the Show (1929), the first all-talking colour film. The enormous financial success of these early sound films enabled Warner Brothers to become a major motion-picture studio. By the 1930s Warner Brothers was producing about 100 motion pictures a year and controlled 360 theatres in the United States and more than 400 abroad.

Warner Brothers became known for its tightly budgeted, technically competent entertainment films. In the early 1930s the company started the craze for gangster films with Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scar face (1932), and throughout the ’30s it presented films featuring such stars as James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson in gangster roles. In the ’30s Warner Brothers also presented Busby Berkeley’s musical extravaganzas, many swashbuckling and adventure films starring Errol Flynn, and dramas featuring such stars as Paul Muni, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, and John Garfield. Among the studio’s best-known films of the 1940s and ’50s were The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), Watch on the Rhine (1943), and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). The studio’s later box-office successes included My Fair Lady (1964), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Exorcist (1973), The Color Purple (1985), and The Fugitive (1993).

Jack Warner was Warner’s long-time vice president in charge of production and became the company’s president in 1956, after the last of his older brothers had retired. He retired in 1972. Meanwhile, Warner Brothers had undergone various corporate changes and had diversified into television programming, book publishing, and musical recordings by the 1970s. In 1969 it became Warner Bros. Inc., a subsidiary of Warner Communications Inc. In 1989 the latter company merged with Time Inc. to form Time Warner Inc., the largest media and Entertainment Corporation in the world. Time Warner inaugurated the WB, a broadcast television network, in 1995.

-Jack Warner

AFTER MERGING WITH TIME.INC TO FORM TIME WARNER:

In 1995, Warner and station owner Tribune Company of Chicago launched The WB Network, finding a niche market in teenagers. The WB's early programming included an abundance of teenage fare like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Small Ville, Dawson’s Creek and One Tree Hill. Two dramas produced by Spelling Television, 7th Heaven and Charmed also helped bring The WB into the spotlight, with "Charmed" lasting eight seasons and being the longest running drama

with female leads and "7th Heaven" surviving eleven seasons and being the longest running family drama and longest running show for The WB. In 2006, Warner and CBS Paramount Television decided to close The WB and CBS's UPN and jointly launch The CW Television Network. In 1999, Terry Semels and Robert Daly resigned as heads of the studio after a career of 13 Oscar nominated films. Many of Warner's top stars were considering quitting because of their absence. Daly and Semels were said to popularize the modern model of partner financing and profit sharing for film production.

In the late 1990s, Warner obtained rights to the Harry Potter novels, and released feature film adaptations of the first in 2001, the second in 2002, the third in June 2004, the fourth in November 2005, and the fifth on July 11, 2007. The sixth was slated for November 2008, but Warner moved it to July 2009 only three months before the movie was supposed to come out, citing the lack of summer blockbusters in 2009 (due to the Writer's Strike) as the reason. The decision was purely financial, and Alan Horn said, "There were no delays. I’ve seen the movie. It is fabulous. We would have been perfectly able to have it out in November. This resulted in a massive fan backlash. The seventh and final adaptation was released in two parts: Part 1 in November 2010 and Part 2 in July 2011.

Warner Bros. played a large part in the discontinuation of the HD DVD format. On January 4, 2008, Warner Bros. announced that they would drop support of HD DVD in favour of Blu-ray Disc. HD DVDs would continue to be released through May 2008 (when their contract with the HD DVD promotion group expired), but only following Blu-ray and DVD releases. This started a chain of events which resulted in HD DVD development and production being halted by Toshiba on February 16, 2008, ending the format war.

In 2009, Warner Bros. became the first studio in history to gross more than $2 billion domestically in a single year.

Warner Bros. is responsible for the Harry Potter film series, the highest grossing film series of all time, both domestic and international without inflation adjustment and Batman film series, one of the only two film series to have two of its films earn more than $1 billion worldwide. It is also responsible for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - PART 2 as Warner Bros.' highest grossing movie ever (the former was The Dark Knight). However, the Harry Potter movies have produced a net loss due to accounting tricks. IMAX Corp. has finalized a pact with Time

Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros.Pictures unit to release as many as 20 giant-format films through 2013.

Since 2006, Warner Bros operated a joint venture with China Film Group Corporation and HG to form Warner China Film HG to produce films in Hong Kong and China, including Connected which is a remake of the 2004 thriller film Cellular; they have co-produced many other Chinese films as well.

ABOUT THE FILMS:

Over the years, a series of mergers and acquisitions have helped Warner Bros. (the present-day Time Warner subsidiary) to accumulate a diverse collection of movies, cartoons, and television programs.

In the aftermath of the 1948 antitrust suit, uncertain times led Warner Bros. in 1956 to sell most of its pre-1950 films and cartoons to a holding company called Associated Artists Productions, also got the Fleischer Studios and Famous Studios Popeye cartoons originally from Paramount. Two years later, Associated Artists Productions was sold to United Artists, which held them until 1981, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought UA.

Five years later, Turner Broadcasting System, having failed to buy MGM, settled for ownership of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought / United Artists library. This included almost all the pre-May 1986 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought film and television library with the exception of those owned by United Artists (i.e. James Bond franchise), although some United Artists material were included such as the Associated Artists Productions library, the U.S. rights to a majority of the RKO Radio Pictures library, and the television series Gilligan's Island.

In 1991, Turner Broadcasting System bought animation studio Hanna-Barbera Productions, and much of the back catalogue of both Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears Enterprises from Great American Broadcasting, and years later, Turner bought Castle Rock Entertainment on December 25, 1993 and New Line Cinema on January 28, 1994. In 1996, Time Warner bought Turner Broadcasting System, and as a result, the pre-1950 sound films and the pre-August 1948 cartoon library (excluding the B&W Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies which WB bought back as it merged with Seven Arts but including the Harman-Ising Merrie Melodies, save Lady, Play Your Mandolin! which was bought back by WB when merging with 7A) returned to WB ownership. WB tried to buy back the pre-1950 sound films and pre-August 1948 cartoons from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / United Artists in 1982, but the deal fell through.

In 2007, Warner Bros. added the Peanuts/Charlie Brown library to its collection (this includes all the television specials and series outside of the theatrical library, which continues to be owned by CBS and Paramount through Peanuts Worldwide, LLC, licensor and owner of the Peanuts material).

In 2008, Warner Bros. closed New Line Cinema as an independent mini-major studio; as a result, Warner added the New Line Cinema film and television library to its collection. On October 15, 2009, Warner Bros. acquired the home entertainment rights to the Sesame Street library, in conjunction with Sesame Workshop.