RKO Pictures was one of the Big Five studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The studio produced two of the most famous films in motion picture history: King Kong and Citizen Kane. In 1981, broadcaster RKO General revived the studio as a production subsidiary, RKO Pictures Inc. In 1989, this business, with its remaining assets, was sold to new owners, who now operate the small independent company R KO Pictures LLC.
About RKO Pictures in brief
RKO Pictures was one of the Big Five studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The studio produced two of the most famous films in motion picture history: King Kong and Citizen Kane. RKO has long been renowned for its cycle of musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the mid-to-late 1930s. In 1981, broadcaster RKO General revived the studio as a production subsidiary, RKO Pictures Inc. In 1989, this business, with its remaining assets, including the trademarks and remake rights to many classic RKO films, was sold to new owners, who now operate the small independent company R KO Pictures LLC. The company was founded after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain and Joseph P. Kennedy’s Film Booking Offices of America studio were brought together under the control of the Radio Corporation of America in October 1928. RCA chief David Sarnoff engineered the merger to create a market for the company’s sound-on-film technology, RCA Photophone. RKO was also responsible for notable co-productions such as It’s a Wonderful Life and Notorious, and it also distributed many celebrated films by animation producer Walt Disney and leading independent producer Samuel Goldwyn. After years of disarray and decline under his control, the studio was acquired by the General Tire and Rubber Company in 1955. The original RKOpictures ceased production in 1957 and was effectively dissolved two years later. The new owners of the company now operate a small independent RKOPictures LLC, which was founded in 1989 and is based in Los Angeles, California, with offices in New York, London, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The current owner of the business is a private equity firm called RKO Capital Partners, which has offices in London, New York and San Francisco, among other locations in the U.S. It is based on the same principles as RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. and RKO Television Pictures, which went out of business in 1957. The business is now owned by a private investment firm, the RKO Entertainment Group, based in San Diego, California. It was founded by a group of former RCA executives, including RCA’s former chief executive, David S Carnoff, in the 1920s and ’30s. The group is still in business today, with a new owner, the Los Angeles-based RKO Media Group, which is based at the Universal Studios complex in California. The RKO Motion Picture Company, which owns the majority of the studio’s assets, was formed in the early ’70s. It has since been sold to a New York-based private equity company, which also owns the movie rights to some of RKO’s classic films, such as The Godfather and The Great Gatsby. The film company is now based in California and has a large distribution arm, including distribution rights to the Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings films. It also has a film distribution arm that has a distribution agreement with Paramount Pictures.
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This page is based on the article RKO Pictures published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.