The Cannon Group
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|
| Private | |
| Industry | Film studio |
| Fate | Defunct |
| Founded | October 23, 1967 |
| Founder | Dennis Friedland Christopher C. Dewey |
| Defunct | 1994 |
| Headquarters | United States (Also owned studios and cinema chains throughout the UK, Israel and Europe) |
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Key people
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Dennis Friedland (1967–1979) Christopher C. Dewey (1967–1979) Menahem Golan (1979–1989) Yoram Globus (1979–1994) Giancarlo Parretti (1989–1990) Ovidio G. Assonitis (1989–1994) Christopher Pearce (1990–1994) |
| Products | Motion pictures Video releasing Cinema Chains (UK & Europe) |
| Subsidiaries | Cannon Video Cannon Cinemas Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment Thorn EMI Video ABC Cinemas |
The Cannon Group, Inc. was an American group of companies, including Cannon Films, which produced a distinctive line of low-to medium-budget films from 1967 to 1994. The extensive group also owned, amongst others, a large international cinema chain and a video film company that invested heavily in the video market, buying the international video rights to several classic film libraries.
The company was very popular and successful in the United Kingdom in particular which is likely due to the company's ownership of several cinema chains in the UK.
Cannon Films was incorporated on October 23, 1967. It was formed by Dennis Friedland and Chris Dewey while they were in their early 20s. They had immediate success producing English-language versions of Swedish soft porn films directed by Joseph W. Sarno: Inga (1968), aka Jag - en oskuld and To Ingrid, My Love, Lisa (1968), aka Kvinnolek. By 1970, they had produced films on a larger production scale than a lot of major distributors, such as Joe, starring Peter Boyle. They managed this by tightly limiting their budgets to $300,000 per picture—or less, in some cases. However, as the 1970s moved on, a string of unsuccessful movies seriously drained Cannon’s capital. This, along with changes to film-production tax laws, led to a drop in Cannon's stock price.
By 1979, Cannon had hit serious financial difficulties, and Friedland and Dewey sold Cannon to Israeli cousins Menahem Golan (who had directed The Apple) and Yoram Globus for $500,000. The two cousins forged a business model of buying bottom-barrel scripts and putting them into production.
They tapped into a ravenous market for action B-pictures in the 1980s. Although they are most remembered for the Death Wish sequels and Chuck Norris action pictures such as The Delta Force and Invasion U.S.A., and igniting a worldwide ninja craze with "The Ninja Trilogy", an anthology series which consisted of Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, and Ninja III: The Domination all starring Sho Kosugi, as well as producing the first two American Ninja films, and even the vigilante thriller Exterminator 2 (the sequel to 1980’s The Exterminator), Cannon’s output was actually far more varied, with musical and comedy films such as Breakin’, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, The Last American Virgin, and the U.S. release of The Apple; period drama pictures such as Lady Chatterley's Lover (1981), Bolero, and Mata Hari (1985); science fiction and fantasy films such as Hercules, Lifeforce and The Barbarians; as well as serious pictures such as John Cassavetes’ Love Streams, Zeffirelli’s Otello (a film version of the Verdi opera), Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don't Dance, and Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train and Shy People; and action/adventure films such as the 3-D Treasure of the Four Crowns, King Solomon’s Mines, and Cobra.
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