Paramount Pictures

Paramount Pictures Corporation (commonly known as Paramount Studios or simply Paramount, and formerly known as Famous Players-Lasky Corporation) is a film studio, television production company and motion picture distributor, consistently ranked as one of the "Big Six" film studios of Hollywood. It is a subsidiary of U.S. media conglomerate Viacom. Paramount is a member of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

In 2014, Paramount Pictures became the first major Hollywood studio to distribute all of its films in digital-form only.

Paramount is the fifth oldest surviving film studio in the world, and America's oldest running studio, founded in 1912.

History

1911–1920: Early history

Paramount is the fifth oldest surviving film studio in the world after the French studios Gaumont Film Company (1895) and Pathé (1896), followed by the Nordisk Film company (1906), and Universal Studios (1912). It is the last major film studio still headquartered in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles.

Paramount

Paramount may refer to:

Companies

Music

XXX (2002 film)

xXx (pronounced "Triple X") is a 2002 American action film directed by Rob Cohen. It stars Vin Diesel as Xander Cage, a thrill seeking extreme sports enthusiast, stuntman and rebellious athlete-turned-reluctant spy for the National Security Agency who is sent on a dangerous mission to infiltrate a group of potential Russian terrorists in Central Europe. xXx also stars Asia Argento, Samuel L. Jackson, and Marton Csokas. Cohen previously directed The Fast and the Furious, in which Diesel also starred.

The film received mixed reviews but was a financial success for the studios, grossing US$277,448,382 worldwide. It was followed by a 2005 sequel entitled xXx: State of the Union.

Plot

An NSA mission to collect intel on Anarchy 99, a mercenary group made up of former Russian soldiers goes awry when the agent's identity is discovered by the group. NSA Agent Augustus Gibbons, overseeing the operation to get any intel on the group's plans for the biochemical weapon named "Silent Night" that has been missing since the fall of the Soviet Union, believes the only way to get close is to recruit an agent that would not have any ties to the United States government. He selects Xander Cage, also known as X, an extreme sports professional and host of his own television show who is outspoken against the government and was recently captured by the FBI for stealing and destroying a prominent California senator's car as an act of protest. Gibbons puts Cage through two tests - stopping a staged diner robbery, and escaping from a drug cartel's plantation in Colombia - and offers Cage the mission. Cage reluctantly agrees when Gibbons offers to wipe his criminal record away.

Image

An image (from Latin: imago) is an artifact that depicts visual perception, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person, thus providing a depiction of it.

Characteristics

Images may be two-dimensional, such as a photograph, screen display, and as well as a three-dimensional, such as a statue or hologram. They may be captured by optical devices – such as cameras, mirrors, lenses, telescopes, microscopes, etc. and natural objects and phenomena, such as the human eye or water.

The word image is also used in the broader sense of any two-dimensional figure such as a map, a graph, a pie chart, or a painting. In this wider sense, images can also be rendered manually, such as by drawing, the art of painting, carving, rendered automatically by printing or computer graphics technology, or developed by a combination of methods, especially in a pseudo-photograph.

A volatile image is one that exists only for a short period of time. This may be a reflection of an object by a mirror, a projection of a camera obscura, or a scene displayed on a cathode ray tube. A fixed image, also called a hard copy, is one that has been recorded on a material object, such as paper or textile by photography or any other digital process.

Paramount Vantage

Paramount Vantage (originally known as Paramount Classics) is the specialty film division of Paramount Pictures (which, in turn, has Viacom as its parent company), charged with producing, purchasing, distributing and marketing films, generally those with a more "art house" feel than films made and distributed by its parent company.

Paramount Classics was launched in 1998 and released such art house fare as The Virgin Suicides, You Can Count on Me, Sunshine, Mostly Martha, Winter Solstice, and three Patrice Leconte films (Girl on the Bridge, The Man on the Train, Intimate Strangers). Although film journalist David Poland felt "Ruth Vitale and David Dinerstein have proven to have wonderful taste heading up Paramount Classics,", the duo was fired in October 2005.

In 2006, the Paramount Vantage brand branched off from Paramount Classics, which was relaunched in 2007 as a distributor of "smaller, review-driven films including foreign-language acquisitions and documentaries."