What was the first major movie studio?
Today, the film world is dominated by five major studios that represent 80% of the market share for English-language movies worldwide. NBC Universal, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros, Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures exert an overwhelming influence on what happens in the movie business, since they hold most of the purse strings and collect most of the cash. And all of them, in some form, have had a colossal bearing on cinema history.
When moving pictures first started out, things were different. The main studios were inseparable from the pioneers of filmmaking itself, with inventors like the Pathé brothers, Robert W Paul, William Kennedy Dickson and Thomas Edison, as well as directors like Georges Méliès, all founded their own studios.
However, since Edison already had the financial clout of the Edison Manufacturing Company behind him, he soon began to monopolise control over the budding industry. This control included the distribution of movies by innovative early filmmakers like Méliès, who made far less from their own films than Edison’s company did. He was also ahead of the game in creating the very first physical movie studio, his famous “Black Maria” in New Jersey, and in patenting many of the first filming and projecting techniques – even ones that he himself played no part in developing.
In 1908, the American businessman moved to consolidate his privileged position in the movie industry further by forming the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC). This company was effectively a cartel involving all of the largest film studios in the United States at the time, led by Edison Studios, and effectively eliminated its competition.
Of course, the amalgamation of all the big studios in the country in the interest of making more money for Edison had the effect of stifling creativity in the film industry. New, independent filmmakers began to circumvent the patents enforced by Edison’s cartel by moving their operations out west, to the tiny Los Angeles suburb of Hollywood.
In 1911, Eastman Kodak, the main producer of film stock in the United States, broke its exclusive agreement with the MPPC and started selling to independent studios. This move opened the door for an explosion of movie production in Hollywood.
So, who overtook Edison first?
The following year, the first two of what would become the eight major film studios were born.
Three of these eight studios still exist in their own right as part of today’s big five major studios.
But four are now subsidiaries of other companies. United Artists is a subsidiary of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which itself belongs to Amazon, 20th Century Fox has become part of Disney, and Columbia Pictures is a subsidiary of Sony. RKO Radio Pictures, meanwhile, is completely defunct, with Warner Bros owning most of its library of films.
The two studios that were first established still exist in their original form, though. Paramount Pictures was founded on May 8th, 1912. And Universal Studios pipped it to the most by just eight days, commencing operations on April 30th, 1912.
112 years later, the two studios are the biggest players around, making up over 30% of the North American market. Edison got there too early to ride the wave of movie-making innovation that would sweep across Hollywood from the mid-1910s, culminating in talkies during the late 1920s and technicolour films from the 1930s onwards. But the timing of Universal and Paramount was just perfect.
