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Hemdale Film Corporation

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Foundation date 1 january 1967

Hemdale Film 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. Hemmings left the company in 1971, and Daly purchased his stock.

Hemdale began as an investment company to cut the high personal taxes on British actors. Eventually, the company went public as Hemdale Ltd. and began diversifying. Hemdale launched a talent agency that helped launch the careers of such bands as Black Sabbath and Yes, invested in feature films, financed stage productions such as Grease, and became involved in boxing promotions such as The Rumble in the Jungle match between George Foreman and Muhammed Ali. Hemdale also distributed cable TV to hotels, which, in 1974, was its major source of revenue. After producing and distributing British films throughout the 1970s, Hemdale relocated to Hollywood in 1980 and focused extensively on movie-making. Derek Gibson later joined the company.

Among its most well-known films are The Terminator, The Return of the Living Dead, Hoosiers, Salvador, River's Edge, Platoon, and The Last Emperor; the latter two were back-to-back recipients of the Academy Award for Best Picture. 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 1991, Eric Parkinson joined Hemdale as president of the company, eventually shutting down its production facilities and duties, and started acquiring and distributing films independently produced by others.

In 1996, Hemdale shut its doors, shortly after it was announced that Daly and Gibson would leave the company. 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 (ironically, Orion was the original distributor for 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 foreign productions Hemdale distributed have subsequently returned to their original owners (such as Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, which producer Tokyo Movie Shinsha now controls worldwide).

In 1991, Hemdale created a collection of many video cassette titles released by Hemdale Home Video, which was formed by Parkinson, 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).

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".