Columbia Pictures

Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production studio that is a member of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group,[2] a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is one of the Big Five studios and a subsidiary of the multinational conglomerate Sony.[3]

On June 19, 1918, brothers Jack and Harry Cohn and their business partner Joe Brandt founded Cohn-Brandt-Cohn (CBC) Film Sales Corporation, which would eventually become Columbia Pictures.[4][5] It adopted the Columbia Pictures name on January 10, 1924 (operating as Columbia Pictures Corporation until December 23, 1968) went public two years later and eventually began to use the image of Columbia, the female personification of the United States, as its logo.

In its early years, Columbia was a minor player in Hollywood, but began to grow in the late 1920s, spurred by a successful association with director Frank Capra. With Capra and others such as the most successful two reel comedy series The Three Stooges, Columbia became one of the primary homes of the screwball comedy. In the 1930s, Columbia's major contract stars were Jean Arthur and Cary Grant. In the 1940s, Rita Hayworth became the studio's premier star and propelled their fortunes into the late 1950s. Rosalind Russell, Glenn Ford and William Holden also became major stars at the studio.

It is one of the leading film studios in the world, and was one of the so-called "Little Three" among the eight major film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age.[6] Today, it has become the world's third largest major film studio.

The company was also primarily responsible for distributing Disney's Silly Symphony film series as well as the Mickey Mouse cartoon series from 1929 to 1932. The studio is headquartered at the Irving Thalberg Building on the former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (currently known as the Sony Pictures Studios) lot in Culver City, California since 1990.