Hemdale Film Corporation

Hemdale Film Corporation (sometimes called Hemdale Releasing Corporation, Hemdale Group, Ltd., or Hemdale Pictures Corporation), known as Hemdale Communications after 1993, was an independent film production company and distributor founded in London in 1967 as the Hemdale Company by actor David Hemmings and his manager, John Daly. Hemdale was initially founded as a talent agency that helped launch the careers of such bands as Black Sabbath and Yes^[1]. However, after Hemmings left the company in 1971, Daly purchased the rest of the company and refocused Hemdale as a film studio. Derek Gibson later joined the company.

It later became well known for the production of The Terminator (1984), Hoosiers (1986), Salvador (1986), River's Edge (1986), Platoon (1986), and The Last Emperor (1987); the latter two films won Hemdale back-to-back Best Picture Academy Awards.

Despite these critical and commercial successes, Hemdale followed these films up with a series of box office bombs and the company eventually declared bankruptcy.

In 1995, Hemdale shut its doors, shortly after it was announced that Daly and Gibson would leave the company.^[2] The library was then incorporated into Consortium de Realisation, a French holding company set up to handle the rights to titles acquired by Credit Lyonnais Bank.

After the studio's closing, the Hemdale library was incorporated into the Orion Pictures output now owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, after MGM acquired the Consortium de Realisation library from PolyGram. Orion ironically originally released many of Hemdale's films. One key exception is The Last Emperor, a Hemdale production originally issued by Columbia Pictures, but whose rights are now held by its producer, Jeremy Thomas. Most of the outside productions Hemdale has distributed have passed back to their original owners (such as Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, which producer Tokyo Movie Shinsha now controls in North America).

In 1991, Hemdale released a collection of many video cassette titles released by Hemdale Home Video around the United States of America. In 1995, the video rights to some of Hemdale's higher-profile titles were licensed to LIVE Entertainment (now Lionsgate).

The company's last new credit was for the Virgin Games video game adaptation of The Terminator, which showed up on the game's start up screen as "Hemdale's The Terminator" in text on the scrolling logo, despite all box art calling it "The Terminator".

Home video titles

• The Terminator (1984, distribution)
• Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1992, distribution)
• The Magic Voyage (1993, distribution)
• The Princess and the Goblin (1994, distribution)

References

External links

• Hemdale Film Corporation at the Internet Movie Database (as Hemdale)
• Hemdale Film Corporation at the Internet Movie Database (under full name)