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De Laurentiis Entertainment Group
Defunct entertainment production company From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG) was an entertainment production company and distribution studio founded by Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis. The company is notable for producing Manhunter, Blue Velvet, the horror films Near Dark and Evil Dead II, King Kong Lives (the sequel to De Laurentiis' remake of King Kong), and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, as well as distributing The Transformers: The Movie.
The company's main studios were located in Wilmington, North Carolina, which is now EUE/Screen Gems Studios. The studio's first releases were in 1986. It went bankrupt two years later after Million Dollar Mystery, among other films, failed at the box office.[1] Carolco Pictures acquired DEG's Wilmington studio in 1989.[2]
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In 1983, Dino De Laurentiis produced Universal Pictures' Firestarter in Wilmington, North Carolina. The governor of North Carolina, Jim Hunt, claimed that the filming increased economic activity in the state. Hunt used incentives and loans to allow De Laurentiis to buy a local warehouse to convert into a studio. In early 1984, De Laurentiis founded the North Carolina Film Corporation, with Martha Schumacher as president.[3]
In 1985, DEG acquired Embassy Pictures from The Coca-Cola Company,[4] allowing for North American distribution of De Laurentiis' new product. Dino De Laurentiis continued to pre-sell his films for overseas distribution, as he had done in the past. In May 1986, De Laurentiis took DEG public, raising $240 million in the process.[5] The following month, DEG's first slate of films were released. In 1986, De Laurentiis formed an Australian subsidiary, De Laurentiis Entertainment Limited (DEL), which built a studio on the Gold Coast.[3] Although De Laurentiis asserted that the company would make films on par with the major studios, most of DEG's slate consisted of films budgeted at $10 million or less, below the industry standard of $14–16 million, with the notable exceptions of King Kong Lives and Tai-Pan, the only studio-level films DEG financed.[5] Also that year, DEG entered into a strategic partnership with producers Fred Silverman and Gordon Farr to launch the syndicated strip Honeymoon Hotel, with a promise to run it for 100 episodes, and a new starring vehicle for Isabel Sanford.[6] Later that year, DEG also financed another syndicated strip with Silverman and Farr to set up California Girls, with Viacom Enterprises serving as distributor of the series.[7]
Canadian distribution of DEG releases were done by Paramount Pictures through its Famous Players division. In May 1986, rival Cineplex Odeon Corporation unsuccessfully attempted to sue Paramount for breaching a pre-set Canadian distribution contract DEG had with the chain's Pan-Canadian Films division.[8]
By August 1987, DEG was $16.5 million in debt, citing the box-office failures and/or disappointments of its product. Dino De Laurentiis refused offers to sell the company because he wanted to retain controlling interest. Around the same time, De Laurentiis' daughter Raffaella exited her role as DEG's president of production.[5] After the release of the HBO Pictures-produced The Trouble with Spies on December 4, 1987, DEG was forced to halt theatrical distribution, with the remaining films in its slate either going direct-to-video or released by other distributors (for example, United Artists acquired distribution rights to the 1988 films Illegally Yours and Pumpkinhead).
In 1988, founder Dino De Laurentiis quit the studio amidst the failures of such films and formed a successor company entitled Dino de Laurentiis Communications.[9] That same year, DEG's Gold Coast studio would be acquired by Village Roadshow, whose intended strategy became the basis for Village Roadshow's Silver Series line, and some of the workforce joined the newly-formed Village Roadshow Pictures.[3][10] A year later, in April 1989, the studio in Wilmington would be sold to Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna's Carolco Pictures. Carolco would also take on production of Total Recall, a film DEG had an early version of in pre-production with Patrick Swayze as Quaid and Bruce Beresford as director (David Cronenberg had also been approached), where it was to have been shot in Australia.[11]
The same year DEG's Wilmington studio was sold to Carolco, its library, along with the Embassy Pictures library that DEG acquired, was sold to Paravision International, then a subsidiary of L'Oréal which also held the Filmation library at the time. The Paravision library excluding Filmation was later sold to Canal+ in 1994. As a result, the DEG library is currently held by StudioCanal; with some exceptions.
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