4 Unlikely Film Production Companies
Sometimes a company gives making films a shot, even though there's no logical reason to do so.
You can tell a lot about the film just from the opening titles; too many means the film is a small independent piece, none means the film was produced by the distributor and is therefore a brainless blockbuster, Weinstein means the film will be trying to get an Oscar etc. Sometimes, as the lights go down and people in the cinema begin to hush for the next couple of hours, a name in the titles will catch your eye. Not an actors or directors name, but the name of one of the films backers, its presence shocking because you cant believe theyre actually a production company. At the start of the age of cinema, all sorts of start ups from bizarre origins existed Universal may have a hundred years of brilliant films, but it all came from clothing store owner Carl Laemmles desire to make a large profit however, now they tend to come from within the industry itself; the most high profile being Dreamworks, created after Jeffrey Katzenberg left Disney. However, as this list will show, production companies can come from the weirdest of places...
Honourable Mention: Invisible Children
A very cheeky mention, but worth putting in given the massive coverage the company got earlier this year. Kony 2012 was incredibly well orchestrated viral smash. A YouTube video that spread across Facebook, Twitter and eventually worldwide news channels, the film pushed the Ugandan warlord Kony into the minds of the general public, at least for a few days. Obviously this isn't a proper film production company, but the way Invisible Children works, putting almost its entire focus on viral videos (most of which have been incredibly unsuccessful) is an odd approach for a charity. Plenty of charities (particularly the larger, more established ones) use a lot of the money raised to increase awareness of their cause, but Invisible Children did so while hiding so much of their actions through slanted truth. Quickly, people began to question their ethics and the validity of their argument, given Kony was no longer viewed as a major threat; in the end the video did more to tarnish the companys reputation than help the cause. This culminated in the videos producer and narrator Jason Russell being arrested for public exposure following a mental breakdown. A sequel was made about a month later, but made a minimal impact nobody cared anymore.