Meet: Niche film production companies

It seems almost every niche audience has an equally niche media entity making movies to serve their interests.  Here are a few that I’ve noticed as I’ve watched more and more movies over the years. Their brand is stamped on many of their projects, although in this day and age very few films are able to be made without the cooperation and finances of many production companies.  Some may even be owned by big entertainment conglomerates.


Like Marvel Enterprises (below) Dark Horse Entertainment focuses on comic book characters but unlike Marvel, their characters are more cult figures, many whom are not 100% good guys.  Hellboy, The Mask, Timecop, and even the goofy Mystery Men are among the offbeat characters that have been made into films. I’m looking forward to the upcoming R.I.P.D. starring Ryan Reynolds.

The easily recognizable Marvel Entertainment logo on a movie guarantees you a superhero experience. Its earliest movie projects were Blade, X-Men, and Spider-Man, all of which spawned their own sequels (and reboots of sequels).  Other hit or miss projects included the popular Ghost Rider franchise starring Nicolas Cage (hit), and the less popular Elektra (miss), one of the few superhero movies to have starred a female character.  Newer hits include the continually lucrative characters Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman).  This company has managed to take a very niche audience and translate their tastes into a lot of big budget movies.

MTV Films might have been the first non-film studio company whose logo I saw on a movie many years ago. Their motto is "Taking the M in MTV and Extending it to Films" but I don't see much of an obvious music component in their film content.  While their c.v. includes stuff like the crude Jackass and Beavis and Butt-head movies, their films have a big range, such as Election starring Reese Witherspoon, Orange County, Napoleon Dynamite, Freedom Writers, and Stop-Loss, as well as a healthy amount of films targeting an African-American audience such as Hustle and Flow, The Original Kings of Comedy, The Fighting Temptations, Tupac: Resurrection, and How She Move.  The last few years though seem to consist of less challenging fare such as Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters and a nod to MTV's music roots with the concert film Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, which seems to show they are slowly moving away from independent film and less of an MTV identity.  Perhaps that is because they are now owned by Viacom/Paramount, and doesn't seem to have its own website anymore.

Nickelodeon Movies, too, was one of the first non-studio companies to break out and produce their own movies. Many of their film projects are as you would assume--big screen treatments of their kid-oriented tv characters such as the Rugrats and Spongebob. Although not my typical choice of movie content, over the years I have watched Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Kung Fu Panda, Megamind, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, the delightfully realized Rango, and the recent animated feature The Adventures of Tintin.  Nickelodeon Movies is also owned by Viacom, but since they continue to catch the lucrative eyeballs of young audiences who will grow up into ticket-paying parents, it has its own page under the Nick.com umbrella of websites.

Pantelion is a new entity formed by established media companies Lionsgate Entertainment and Grupo Televisa.  As a result, the artistic merging of these two talents created a film company targeting the increasing population of the Latino market, especially here in the United States.  Many of their films are subtitled, including the goofy Casa de mi Padre starring Will Ferrell.  Although right now they have a small roster of films, titles include Girl in Progress, Saving Private Perez, and From Prada to Nada.  Next up for them is Hecho in Mexico, a documentary about the arts in Mexico, with several musicians as well as actor Diego Luna.

WWE Studios is, I believe, a subsidiary of World Wrestling Entertainment and one of the newer logos I've seen, although they've been around a while. They started their career co-producing The Scorpion King, starring wrestler-turned-actor The Rock aka Dwayne Johnson, and continued with other wrestler-turned-actor vehicles (which they continue to produce).  Their current lineup is almost all in the action genre and can star some big acting names, wrestlers or not.  One of their new films, No One Lives, is even appearing at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival.  Two recently-produced films are Dead Man Down, starring Colin Farrell, and The Call with Halle Berry. Can’t imagine them in the wrestling ring!