7 Film Studios That No Longer Exist, and Who Owns Their Movies Now

A studio’s name can vanish from the front of a movie without the movie going anywhere. The films stay in circulation, but the rights move to whoever bought the catalog, and that isn’t always the company you’d guess.

Here are seven studios that stopped operating as independent companies, along with the current homes of their libraries. Some answers are simple. Others took decades of sales, mergers and bankruptcies to settle.

RKO Pictures

RKO was one of the major Hollywood studios of the classic era, and it stopped making films in the late 1950s. Its catalog includes Citizen Kane, the original King Kong and several Astaire and Rogers musicals. The studio itself faded as its owners sold off assets and the old studio system broke down.

Today much of that classic library sits with Warner Bros., which gained it through the Turner library deals of the 1980s. A separate company called RKO Pictures LLC revived the name later and holds certain remake and derivative rights. So the original films and the right to remake them can belong to different owners.

Republic Pictures

Republic was founded in 1935 and built its reputation on westerns, serials and B pictures. It also produced prestige titles such as The Quiet Man, which starred John Wayne. The studio stopped producing films in the late 1950s, though the name returned later as a television and video brand.

That brand was bought by Spelling Entertainment in the 1990s, and Spelling was then folded into Viacom. As a result, the Republic library is now controlled by Paramount, which sits under Paramount Global’s successor structure. Few viewers watching an old Wayne western would guess it ended up there.

Orion Pictures

Orion was founded in 1978 by a group of executives who left United Artists, and it had a remarkable run in the 1980s and early 1990s. Its films included Amadeus, RoboCop, Dances with Wolves and The Silence of the Lambs. Financial trouble followed, and the company went through bankruptcy protection in the 1990s.

MGM bought Orion in 1997, and the library has been part of the MGM catalog ever since. Amazon then acquired MGM in a deal valued at about eight and a half billion dollars, which closed in 2022. Orion’s films now sit inside Amazon MGM Studios, and the Orion name has been revived as a label.

Cannon Films

Cannon was the low budget action factory of the 1980s, known for Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris vehicles and for the Death Wish sequels. It also took on more ambitious projects, which stretched its finances. By the early 1990s the company had effectively collapsed.

Cannon’s catalog passed through the hands of a European financier’s group and eventually landed with MGM. The details of individual titles can vary, so rights for specific films are worth checking. In broad terms, though, much of Cannon’s output is now part of the library that Amazon owns through MGM.

Carolco Pictures

Carolco made some of the biggest action films of its era, including the first Rambo movie, Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Its costs kept climbing, and the company filed for bankruptcy in 1995. It lasted only about two decades in total.

The library was acquired out of bankruptcy by the French company Studiocanal, which still holds many of those titles. The Terminator franchise is a notable exception to the simple picture, since director James Cameron regained certain rights to the series in 2019. Carolco’s story shows how a single studio’s films can end up split between several owners.

The Weinstein Company

Bob and Harvey Weinstein founded the company in 2005 after leaving Miramax. It released awards favorites including The King’s Speech, Silver Linings Playbook and Django Unchained. After the allegations against Harvey Weinstein became public in 2017, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018.

Lantern Capital Partners bought the assets in a deal reported at roughly two hundred ninety million dollars, and the business became Lantern Entertainment. Spyglass Media Group later acquired Lantern in 2021. Spyglass now controls the Weinstein Company library, though some individual films were produced with outside partners, so ownership can vary by title.

20th Century Fox

Fox was one of Hollywood’s oldest and most successful studios, with franchises such as Star Wars, Avatar, Planet of the Apes and the X-Men films. Disney completed its acquisition of the studio’s entertainment assets in March 2019, in a deal valued at about seventy one billion dollars. In 2020 Disney dropped the word Fox from the name, and the studio became 20th Century Studios.

The name lives on as a label, but the company that once stood on its own is now a division of Disney. Fox Corporation kept the news and sports businesses and is a separate company. Disney’s ownership means classic Fox films and the Avatar series now appear on Disney’s streaming and licensing platforms.