Timeline-PMI/Sony Pictures Entertainment

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**Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.** (commonly known as **Sony Pictures** or **SPE**, and formerly known as **Columbia Pictures Entertainment, Inc.**) is an American diversified multinational mass media and entertainment studio conglomerate that produces, acquires, and distributes filmed entertainment (theatrical motion pictures, television programs, and recorded videos) through multiple platforms.

Through an intermediate holding company called Sony Film Holding Inc., it is operated as a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment Inc., which is itself a subsidiary of the multinational technology and media conglomerate Sony Group Corporation. Based at the Sony Pictures Studios lot in Culver City, California as one of the "Big Five" major American film studios, it encompasses Sony's motion picture, television production and distribution units.

## History

### 1991-2000

The company was renamed as Sony Pictures Entertainment on August 7, 1991. Also that year, Jon Peters left Columbia to start Peters Entertainment with a three-year exclusive production agreement at the studio at first, before transitioning to a non-exclusive deal at the studio. Longtime CPE employee Laurie MacDonald also left to start Aerial Pictures at the studio, first for a two-year deal, before going to 20th Century Fox in 1993, and being swallowed up by Amblin Entertainment later that year, eventually setting up DreamWorks.

Sony has since created and aquired numerous other film production and distribution units, such as creating Sony Pictures Classics for art-house fare, by forming Columbia TriStar Pictures (also known as the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group) by merging Columbia Pictures and TriStar Pictures in 1998, revitalizing Columbia's former television division Screen Gems, purchasing Miramax for mixed genre films, and distribution in South America. It expanded its operations on April 8, 2005, when Sony acquired the legendary Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), in a US$4.8 billion leveraged buyout.

### 2000-2010

In July 2000, a marketing executive working for Sony Corporation created a fictitious film critic, David Manning, who gave consistently good reviews for releases from Sony subsidiary Columbia Pictures that generally received poor reviews amongst real critics. Sony later pulled the ads, suspended Manning's creator and his supervisor and paid fines to the state of Connecticut and to fans who saw the reviewed films in the US. Also, in 2002,, Sony was offered a deal to purchase British animation studio Aardman. They accepted, folding it into their animation studio, Sony Pictures Animation.

On June 4, 2008, SPE's wholly owned group 2JS Productions B.V. acquired Dutch production company 2waytraffic N.V., famous for *Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?*, acquired from the original production company Celador, and *You Are What You Eat* for £114.3 million ($223.2 million in US dollars).

## List of compaines acquired by Sony

Here's a temporary list of companies under the hands of Sony Pictures. (Will receive it's own page later)

* Miramax (acquired in 1999, after it's declined offer for Dimension Films in 1998)
* Metro Goldwyn Mayer (aquired in 2005, for action and drama genres)
* Alliance Films (acquired in 2012, for production and distribution in Canada, as well as production in the UK)
* Dreamworks Pictures (Romance, and dark humor genres)