Sony Pictures Entertainment

Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. (SPE) is the American entertainment subsidiary of Sony Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Japanese multinational technology and media conglomerate Sony.

Based in Culver City, California, it encompasses Sony's motion picture, television production and distribution units. Its group sales in March 31, 2015 has been reported to be of $7.3 billion.

Throughout the years, SPE has produced, distributed, or co-distributed successful franchises such as Spider-Man, Men in Black, Underworld, and Resident Evil.

Sony Pictures Entertainment is a member of the Motion Picture Association of America.

History

On September 1, 1987, The Coca-Cola Company announced plans to spin-off its assets of Columbia Pictures, which they had owned since 1982. Under this arrangement, Coca-Cola would sell their entertainment assets to Tri-Star Pictures, of which they owned 39.6%. Tri-Star would be renamed to Columbia Pictures Entertainment, Inc. (CPE), with Coca-Cola owning 49%, its shareholders owning 31%, and Tri-Star's shareholders owning 20%. A new company was formed in early 1988 with the Tri-Star name to take over the studio's production operations.

Sony Pictures Animation

Sony Pictures Animation is an American animated film production company owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, founded in May 2002. It works closely with Sony Pictures Imageworks, which handles digital production. Theatrical releases are distributed by Columbia Pictures, and direct-to-video releases are distributed by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. The studio's franchises include Open Season, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Smurfs and Hotel Transylvania.

History

In 2001, Sony Pictures Entertainment considered selling off its visual effects facility Sony Pictures Imageworks. After failing to find a suitable buyer, having been impressed with the CGI sequences created for Stuart Little 2, and seeing the box office success of Shrek and Monsters, Inc., SPI was reconfigured to become an animation studio. Astro Boy, which had been in development at Sony since 1997 as a live-action film, was set to be SPI's first all-CGI film. In May 2002, Sony Pictures Animation was established to develop characters, stories and movies, with SPI taking over the digital production while maintaining its visual effects production. Meanwhile, SPI produced two short films, The ChubbChubbs! and Early Bloomer, as a result of testing its strengths and weakness in producing all-CG animation.

Sony

Sony Corporation (ソニー株式会社, Sonī Kabushiki Gaisha), commonly referred to as Sony /ˈsoʊniː/, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Kōnan Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Its diversified business includes consumer and professional electronics, gaming, entertainment and financial services. The company is one of the leading manufacturers of electronic products for the consumer and professional markets. Sony is ranked 116th on the 2015 list of Fortune Global 500.

Sony Corporation is the electronics business unit and the parent company of the Sony Group, which is engaged in business through its four operating segments – electronics (including video games, network services and medical business), motion pictures, music and financial services. These make Sony one of the most comprehensive entertainment companies in the world. Sony's principal business operations include Sony Corporation (Sony Electronics in the U.S.), Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, Sony Mobile Communications (formerly Sony Ericsson) and Sony Financial. Sony is among the Worldwide Top 20 Semiconductor Sales Leaders and as of 2013, the fourth-largest television manufacturer in the world, after Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and TCL.

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.

Michael Keaton

Michael John Douglas (born September 5, 1951), better known by his stage name Michael Keaton, is an American actor. He is currently a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University. Keaton first rose to fame for his comedic film roles in Night Shift (1982), Mr. Mom (1983), Johnny Dangerously (1984), and Beetlejuice (1988), and he earned further acclaim for his dramatic portrayal of Bruce Wayne / Batman in Tim Burton's Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992). Since then, he has appeared in a variety of films ranging from dramas and romantic comedies to thriller and action films, such as Clean and Sober (1988), The Dream Team (1989), Pacific Heights (1990), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), My Life (1993), The Paper (1994), Multiplicity (1996), Jackie Brown (1997), The Other Guys (2010), Need for Speed (2014), and RoboCop (2014), and he also provided voices for characters in the animated films Cars (2006), Toy Story 3 (2010), and Minions (2015).

Keaton's critically praised lead performance in Birdman (2014) earned him a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, the Critics' Choice Award for Best Actor, and a nomination for a Screen Actors Guild Award, British Academy Film Award, and Academy Award for Best Actor. He previously received a Golden Globe nomination for his performance in Live from Baghdad (2002) and a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for The Company (2007). Keaton was awarded a Career Achievement Award from both the Hollywood Film Festival and Zurich Film Festivals.