Warner Brothers.

Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., is an American producer of film, television, music entertainment and motion picture and post production facilities in the world, it is the studio in which hundreds of magnificent films and television shows have been created and filmed. The site which they own is parent to 30 sound stages.

The Warner Brothers were found by 4 brothers whose names are: Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack, whose Jewish parents immigrated to North America. They opened first a theatre, the Cascade, in New Castle, Pennsylvania in 1903. In 1904, the Warner’s founded the Pittsburgh-based Duquesne Amusement & Supply Company, to distribute films. By the time of World War I they had begun producing films, and in 1918 the brothers opened the Warner Bros. studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Sam and Jack Warner produced the pictures, while Harry and Albert Warner and their auditor and now controller Chase handled finance and distribution in New York City. On April 4, 1923, with help from a loan given to Harry Warner by his banker, they formally incorporated as Warner Brothers Pictures, Incorporated. However, as late as the 1960s, Warner Bros. claimed 1905 as its founding date.

The first important deal for the company was the acquisition of the rights to Avery Hopwood's 1919 Broadway play, The Gold Diggers, from theatrical impresario David Belasco. However what really made the famous was the dog they brought from France: Rin Tin Tin which debuted in the feature Where the North Begins. The movie was so successful that Jack Warner agreed to sign the dog to star in more films for $1,000 per week. Rin Tin Tin became the top star at the studio. 

 

Despite the success of Rin Tin Tin, Warners was still unable to achieve star power. As a result, Sam and Jack decided to offer Broadway actor John Barrymore the lead role in Beau Brummel. The film was so successful that Harry Warner agreed to sign Barrymore to a generous long-term contract; like The Marriage Circle, Beau Brummell was named one of the ten best films of the year by The New York Times. By the end of 1924, Warner Bros. was arguably the most successful independent studio in Hollywood, but it still competed with "The Big Three" Studios First National, Paramount Pictures, and MGM. As a result, Harry Warner was able to convince the filmmakers to spend $500,000 in newspaper advertising, and Harry saw this as an opportunity to finally be able to establish theatres in big cities like New York and Los Angeles. 

As the studio prospered, it gained backing from Wall Street, and in 1924 Goldman Sachs arranged a major loan. With this new money, the Warners bought the pioneer Vitagraph Company which had a nation-wide distribution system. In 1925, Warners also experimented in radio, establishing a successful radio station, KFWB, in Los Angeles.

In 1925, the Warners agreed to expand their operations by adding this feature to their productions. After a long period of denying Sam's request for sound, Harry now agreed to accept Sam's demands, as long as the studio's use of synchronized sound was for background music purposes only. The Warners then signed a contract with the sound engineer company Western Electric and established Vitaphone. In 1926, Vitaphone began making films with music and effects tracks, most notably, in the feature Don Juan starring John Barrymore. The film was silent, but it featured a large number of Vitaphone shorts at the beginning. Don Juan premiered at the Warner Theatre in New York on August 6, 1926. Throughout the early history of film distribution, theatre owners hired orchestras to attend film showings and provide soundtracks. However Don Juan didn’t earn back its production costs. By the April of 1927, the Big Five studios First National, Paramount, MGM, Universal, and Producers Distributing had put the Warner brothers in financial ruin, and Western Electric renewed Warner's Vitaphone contract with terms that allowed other film companies to test sound.

As a result of the financial problems the studio was having, Warner Bros. took the next step and released The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson. This movie, which has very little sound dialog but does feature sound segments of Jolson singing, was a sensation. Thanks to the success of The Jazz Singer, the studio was suddenly flush with cash. Jolson's next film for the company, The Singing Fool was also a success. With the success of these first talkies Warner Bros. became one of the top studios in Hollywood and the brothers were now able to move out from the Poverty Line of Hollywood and buy a big studio in Burbank, California.

In 1929, Warner Bros also bought the St. Louis-based theatre chain Skouras Brothers. And was able to produce an adaptation of a Cole Porter musical titled Fifty Million Frenchmen, and gained complete control of First National, one of the big three, when Harry purchased the company's remaining one-third share from Fox and produce and release a few films each year under the First National name until 1938.

Also in 1929, Jack Warner hired sixty-one year old actor George Arliss to star in Disraeli, which was a surprise success. By 1931, however, the studio began to feel the effects of the Depression as the general public became unable to afford the price of a movie ticket. In 1931, the studio reportedly suffered a net loss of $8 million, and an additional $14 million the following year.

In 1928, Warner Bros. released Lights of New York, the first all-talking feature. Due to its success, the movie industry converted entirely. In 1929, National Pictures released their first film with Warner Bros., Noah's Ark. Despite its expensive budget, Noah's Ark was profitable. In 1929, Warner Bros. released “On with the Show”, the first all-colour all-talking feature. This was followed by Gold Diggers of Broadway which was so popular it played in theatres until 1939. The success of these two colour pictures caused a colour revolution. Warner Bros. released a large number of colour films from 1929 to 1931, some of which are: Sally in 1929, Golden Dawn in 1930, Hold Everything in 1930, Song of the Flame in 1930, Fifty Million Frenchmen in 1931, and Manhattan Parade in 1932.

In February 1933, however, Warner Bros. produced 42nd Street, a very successful musical that saved the company from bankruptcy. By the end of the year, people again tired of Warner Bros. musicals, and the studio, after the huge profits made by the 1935 film Captain Blood, shifted its focus on producing Errol Flynn swashbucklers.

Through the years 1931 and 1935, the Warner brothers were signing famous artists and making grate films for the audiences, so they could gaining profit but also gain the money they had lost in the at the Burbank studio at the end of 1934, destroying 20 years worth of early Vitagraph. The films they had created include: The Petrified Forest, Baby Face. They had sign artists such as: Dorothy Mackaill, Bebe Daniels, Frank Fay, Winnie Lightner, Bernice Claire, Alexander Gray, Alice White and many more. 

During 1936, Harry Warner's daughter Doris read a copy of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and was interested in making a film adaptation. Doris then offered Mitchell $50,000 for the book's screen rights. However jack, refused to allow the deal to take place, realizing it would be an expensive production. In 1937 Harry Warner produced the successful anti-German film The Life of Emile Zola as the world war2 had started. After that, Harry supervised the production of several more anti-German films, including Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939, The Sea Hawk in 1940, which made King Phillip II an equivalent of Hitler.

In 1941 Jack Warner signed newly-released MGM actress Joan Crawford, a former top star who found her career fading. Crawford's first role with the studio was 1944's Hollywood Canteen. Her first starring role at the studio, in the title role as Mildred Pierce in 1945, revived her career and earned her an Oscar for Best Actress. Through the year 1944 Warner Bros bought Schlesinger's cartoon unit which were made from 1930 to 1933, Disney old producers Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising produced a series of musical cartoons for Leon Schlesinger, renamed it as Warner Bros. Cartoons.

In the early 1950s, the threat of television had grown greatly, and in 1953, Jack Warner decided to take a new approach to compete with the rising threat. In the wake of United Artists successful 3D film Bwana Devil, he decided to expand into 3D films with the studio's 1953 film House of Wax. Unfortunately, despite the success of House of Wax, 3-D films soon lost their appeal among moviegoers.

Early in 1953, the Warner theatre holdings were spun off as Stanley Warner Theatres and its theatres merged with RKO Theatres to become RKO-Stanley Warner Theatres. By 1956, however, the studio was losing money. By the end of 1953, the studio's net profit was $2.9 million and ranged between $2 and $4 million for the next two years. In February 1956, Jack Warner sold the rights to all of the studio's pre-1950 films to Associated Artists Productions. In May 1956, the brothers announced they were putting Warner Bros. on the market; Jack however, secretly organized a meeting with banker Serge Semenenko to purchase 800,000 shares, 90% of the company's stock. After the three brothers sold, Jack through his secret deal joined Semenenko's syndicate and bought back all his stock, 200,000 shares. Shortly after the deal was completed in July, Jack appointed himself new president. By the time Harry and Albert learned of their brother's dealings, it was too late. Shortly after the deal was closed, Jack Warner announced the company would be "directed more vigorously to the acquisition of the most important story properties, talents, and to the production of the finest motion pictures possible”. 

The success of the Maverick, Bronco, and Colt .45 series helped to make up for the losses on the film side, as it was not a success. As a result, Jack Warner decided to emphasize television production. Warners then produced a series of popular private detective shows beginning with 77 Sunset Strip in 1958–64 followed by Hawaiian Eye in 1959–1963, Bourbon Street Beat in 1960 and Surfside Six in 1960–1962. Warner Bros. was already the owner of extensive music-publishing holdings, whose tunes had appeared in countless Warners cartoons and television shows. In 1958 the studio launched Warner Bros. Records. Initially the label released recordings made by their television stars whether they could sing or not and records based on the soundtracks of favourite Warner Bros. Television shows. In its first eighteen months, Warner Bros. Records lost around $2 million.

n each of the first three years of the 1960s, the studio's net profit was a little over $7 million. Warner paid an unprecedented $5.5 million for the film rights to the Broadway musical My Fair Lady in February 1962. The previous owner, In 1963, the net profit dropped to $3.7 million. By the mid-1960s, motion picture production was in decline. There were few studio-produced films and many more co-productions for which Warner provided facilities, money, and distribution.

From 1971 until the end of 1987, Warner's international distribution operations were a joint venture with Columbia Pictures, and in some countries, this joint venture also distributed films from other companies like EMI Films and Cannon Films in the UK. Warner ended the venture in 1988 and joined up with Walt Disney Pictures; this joint venture lasted until 1993, when Disney created Buena Vista International.  In 1972 in a cost-cutting move, Warner and Columbia Pictures formed a partnership called The Burbank Studios in which they would share production facilities utilizing the Warner lot in Burbank. The partnership ended in 1990 when Columbia moved into the former MGM studio lot in Culver City.

In the late 1990s, Warner obtained rights to the Harry Potter novels, and released feature film adaptations of the first in 2001, the second in 2002, the third in June 2004, the fourth in November 2005, and the fifth on July 11, 2007. The sixth was slated for November 2008, but Warner moved it to July 2009 only three months before the movie was supposed to come out, citing the lack of summer blockbusters in 2009 due to the Writer's Strike as the reason. This resulted in a massive fan backlash. The seventh and final adaptation was released in two parts: Part 1 in November 2010 and Part 2 in July 2011.

On January 4, 2008, Warner Bros. announced that they would drop support of HD DVD in favour of Blu-ray Disc. HD DVDs would continue to be released through May 2008 when their contract with the HD DVD promotion group expired, but only following Blu-ray and DVD releases. This started a chain of events which resulted in HD DVD development and production being halted by Toshiba on February 16, 2008, ending the format war.


Warner Bros. and National CineMedia have formed a partnership to provide pre-feature entertainment and advertising in movie theatres nationwide. In 2009, Warner Bros. became the first studio in history to gross more than $2 billion domestically in a single year. In 2010, Warner Bros. had a deal with French film distributor, Pathé to handle their films for theatrical distribution in the UK with 20th Century Fox still distributing their film catalogue for DVD release. Flixster including Rotten Tomatoes was acquired by Warner Bros. in May 2011