It takes a lot to get a movie studio going. Trying to get an annual pipeline of movies going on its own is a daunting prospect, let alone making those individual films successful. To boot, once you get this brand new studio going, keeping it alive for a prolonged period of time is incredibly rare. Even when just looking at attempts to do so in the past two decades, numerous attempts to create a new major player in the American film industry have fizzled out despite ample amounts of talent involved. Remember Relativity Media, once a co-financier of countless movies in Hollywood that tried to become a self-distributing movie studio and ended up going down in all kinds of legal trouble? As chronicled in Nicole Laporte's excellent book The Men Who Would Be King (the book that first got me so captivated by movie studio drama), DreamWorks SKG started out its life with sprawling ambitions to be a rival to Disney only to end up, starting in the Fall 2016, as a division of Universal Pictures.
And then there's Studio 8, a company started up in the summer of 2014 by Jeff Robinov, former President of Warner Bros. for six years who left the WB lot in 2013 and proceeded to take a cue from a bunch of media moguls in the period of 2012-2015 and strike up big bucks in China to start up his own entertainment company. The plans for the company were ambitious as hell, as detailed in a June 2014 Deadline article, the studio was planning to provide all of the financing for their projects and was looking to make half-a-dozen projects a year. Three months later, the studio officially set up shot at Sony/Columbia (who would distribute their projects) and important staff positions were already being set up at the studio. As 2014 drew to a close, Studio 8 was looking set to be a major player in Hollywood.
Throughout 2015, Studio 8 made entertainment news headlines as they grabbed a number of pitches for feature film projects, started up a TV division and departed from their stated practice of entirely financing any films they partake in to help finance Ang Lee's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (Remember that movie? No? I don't blame you). However, by the end of the year, not a single Studio 8 project (sans Billy Lynn, which they were only partially financing), whether in film or tv, had gone before the cameras. That would finally change the following February as their first project, this Friday's new release Alpha, then called The Soultrean, started filming but the scarcity of Studio 8 projects despite all their financing was still troubling. I imagine Sony/Columbia was wishing Studio 8 could also hurry up and get some movies going given what a dreadful 2015 they had had at the domestic box office (2016 would be another rough year for the studio financially).
The first feature to bear the Studio 8 logo, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, ended up coming and going in the blink of an eye over Thanksgiving 2016 as the new Ang Lee movie ended up grossing only $1.7 million domestically, the sixth worst domestic gross ever for a movie that went into wide release in the expansive history of Sony/Columbia. Two months after the film debuted, Variety published an article entitled Is Jeff Robinov Looking For The Exit? What's Behind Studio 8's Slow Start that explored the companies issues with getting a steady slate of films going. Apparently, Jeff Robinov was trying to take his time with making sure the films his new studio put out were of a high level of quality, though likely more troublesome was the movie studio he had aligned Studio 8 with, Sony/Columbia, Most notably, he was reportedly not getting well with the newly appointed head of Sony/Columbia, Tom Rothman (a figure of controversy in his tenure at 20th Century Fox a decade prior).
Studio 8 was finally drawing eyeballs and drumming up conversation, but instead of people talking about the success of their projects, folks were chatting up on how little the heavily-hyped studio had accomplished after securing boatloads of financing. At least a second Studio 8 movie, White Boy Rick starring Matthew McConaughey, started filming a few months after the Variety piece while the studio kept on acquiring projects throughout 2017 as their first movie, Alpha, kept suffering noteworthy release date bumps. First scheduled for September 2017, the feature got bumped to March 2018 before the final week of 2017 saw it getting a six-month delay to September 2018 (it was shifted to its final August 17, 2018 release date back in April).
As 2018 began, it was noted in a Deadline news piece that Jeff Robinov and newly appointed head of Studio 8 television Steve Mosko were seeking a new home for Studio 8 once the studio's contract with Sony/Columbia was up in October 2018. This was followed up by news of the studio seeking $200 million in financing just two months later as a way of creating a more robust pipeline for the studio. It's doubtful Alpha, which is projected to gross just $6-8 million this weekend, will be the glorious box office hit kick-off for Studio 8's in-house project that the company would like, but it's obvious, especially with major developments in two different high-profile comic book movies the studio has had in the pipeline, that Studio 8 isn't going down yet. Still, four years after it was announced, Studio 8 is far from the sprawling media company regularly churning out event movies that Jeff Robinov likely had in mind. Instead, Studio 8 is yet another example of a new American movie studio with mighty big ambitions that ended up with far more meager results.
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