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A film studio (also known as movie studio or simply studio) is a major entertainment company that makes . Today, studios are mostly financing and distribution entities. In addition, they may have their own studio facility or facilities; however, most firms in the entertainment industry have never had their own studios, but have rented space from other companies instead. Day-to-day filming operations are generally handled by a production company subsidiary.
Another type of company is an independently owned studio facility, which does not produce motion pictures by itself; such facilities only sell studio space.
In the early 1900s, companies started moving to Los Angeles, for location shoots. Although were widely available by that time, none were powerful enough to expose film adequately; the best illumination for film production came from natural sunlight. Some movies were shot on building roofs in downtown Los Angeles. Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company, based in New York City, controlled almost all relevant to movie production at the time. Early movie producers relocated to Southern California to escape patent enforcement, an advantage of more lenient local courts, as well as physical distance from company detectives and mob allies. (Edison's patents expired in 1913.)
The first film studio in Los Angeles was a branch studio of Selig Polyscope, in the Edendale area in 1909. The first studio in the Hollywood area was Nestor Studios, opened in 1911 by Al Christie for David Horsley. In the same year, another 15 independent studios settled in Hollywood. Other production companies eventually settled in the Los Angeles area in places such as Culver City, Burbank, and what would soon become known as Studio City in the San Fernando Valley. Los Angeles had a strong, early, public-health response to the 1918 flu epidemic, How one city avoided the 1918 flu pandemic's deadly second wave relative to other American cities, which reduced the number of local cases and led to a faster overall recovery; this contributed to the increasing dominance of Hollywood over New York City in the movie industry.
By the mid-1920s, a handful of American production companies had evolved into motion-picture conglomerates that owned their own studios, film distributor, and movie theater, and contracted with performers and other filmmaking personnel. This situation led to the sometimes confusing equation of studio with production company in industry slang. Five large companies—RKO Radio Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—came to be known as the Big Five, the majors, or the Studios in trade publications such as Variety; their management structures and practices collectively came to be known as the studio system.
The Little 3
Although they owned few or no theaters to guarantee sales of their films, several other studios also fell under the rubrics above: Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and United Artists. There were thus a total of eight generally recognized major studios. United Artists, although its controlling partners owned two production studios during the Golden Age, often had a tenuous hold on the title of major; this studio operated mainly as a backer and distributor of independently produced films.
The sound stage is the central component of a studio lot. Most studios have several: small studios may have as few as one, and large studios have as many as 20 to 30. Movie studios also provide office space for studio executives and production companies, and makeup rooms and rehearsal rooms for Talent agency. If space allows, a studio may have an exterior backlot. Finally, there is a studio "commissary", which is the traditional term in the movie industry for a company cafeteria.
Beyond these basic components, the largest studios are full-service enterprises offering the range of production and post-production services necessary to create a motion picture; these services include costumes, props, cameras, sound recording, crafts, sets, lighting, special effects, cutting, editing, mixing, scoring, automated dialogue replacement (ADR), re-recording, and foley. Independent suppliers of these and other services (e.g., photographic processing labs) are often found in clusters near film studios.
Sets and backlots have always been highly flammable, and nitrate film (manufactured until 1951) was also very flammable. For this reason, film studios built in the early-to-mid 20th century have to facilitate firefighting. These towers "somewhat inexplicably" evolved into "a most potent symbol ... of movie studios in general."
International markets account for a growing proportion of Hollywood movie revenue, with approximately 70% of total movie revenue coming from international ticket sales; the Chinese domestic box-office revenue is projected to outpace that of US in 2020. The growth of film studios and filmmaking outside of Hollywood and the US has produced popular international studio locations such as Hollywood North (Vancouver and Toronto in Canada), Bollywood (Mumbai, India), and Nollywood (Lagos, Nigeria).
As the studios grew, they began to rely on production companies such as J. J. Abrams' Bad Robot to handle many creative and physical aspects of feature films. By reducing direct production activities, the studios transformed into financing and distribution entities for their films (generally made by affiliated production companies). With the decreasing cost of CGI and visual effects, many studios sold large chunks of previously massive studio spaces or backlots to private real-estate developers. Century City in Los Angeles was once part of the 20th Century Fox backlot, which was among the largest and most famous of the studio lots. In most cases, portions of the backlots were retained and are available for rental by various film and television productions. Some studios offer tours of their backlots; Universal Pictures allows visitors to its adjacent Universal Studios Hollywood theme park to take a tram tour of the backlot where films such as Psycho and Back to the Future were shot.
In fall 2019, movie mogul Tyler Perry opened Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. Perry's studio lot is claimed to be larger than many studio lots in Hollywood.
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