DEJ Productions

DEJ Productions

Three different logos used by the company
Former type	Subsidiary of First Look Pictures
Industry	Entertainment
Fate	Folded by First Look Pictures
Founded	1998
Defunct	2006
Headquarters	Los Angeles, U.S.A.
Key people	Dean Wilson, Ed Stead, John Antioco
Products	Motion pictures, home video
Owner	Blockbuster LLC (1998-2005) First Look Studios (2005-2006)

DEJ Productions was an American film studio founded in 1998 by Dean Wilson, Ed Stead and John Antioco.

The studio distributed 225 films in just eight years, including the Academy Award-winning Monster starring Charlize Theron and the multiple Academy Award-winning Crash which won Best Picture of the Year. DEJ was a film acquisition company which began in 1998, shortly after the introduction of the medium of DVD. The home video industry was undergoing a major economic change and DEJ was established to pick-up low-budget films primarily to get exclusive DVD releases for its parent company, Blockbuster Video. DEJ was named after the first initials of three top Blockbuster executives at the time, its Executive Vice President Dean Wilson, its General Counsel and Executive Vice President of Business Development Ed Stead, and its CEO John Antioco. The company released a few of its acquired films theatrically. A notable example was the U.S. rights to the Sylvester Stallone film D-Tox, which Universal Studios declined to distribute in the U.S. DEJ picked up the film and released it under the title Eye See You, a name it also used in the home video release.

Based in Los Angeles, DEJ picked up around three dozen films annually. Its first film acquired was the home video distribution of Still Breathing, starring Brendan Fraser. It acquired the rights to the biopics of two mass murderers in Dahmer and Gacy. DEJ also picked up films such as Party Monster and Grand Theft Parsons at festivals including the Sundance Film Festival. In the case of a theatrical release such as 2004's My Date With Drew, Blockbuster stores would promote the film both in its store and on its website. Because DEJ was in the Blockbuster corporate umbrella during a period in which Viacom owned Blockbuster, DEJ could also sell the rights to Viacom's cable networks including Starz or Showtime while obtaining video rights to first run titles airing on the cable channels such as Whoopi Goldberg's made-for-Showtime film, Good Fences. In the media industry, this was considered a synergistic business model. One of the founding partners, Dean Wilson, explained DEJ's philosophy on convincing filmmakers of their business model in an interview in 2002. He said, "A lot of filmmakers initially have this belief that they're not a success unless they end up in a theater...They all want to be Spielberg and all want to make tons of money eventually, but I think that in a lot of these early projects, they put everything into it, and I would love to see theatrical release. But I think they're now coming to terms with the fact theatrical release isn't available for everything. We offer up exposure to people, which, when it comes down to it, is really what they want."