Carolco Pictures

~ the last words ~

Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna registered Anabasis Investments in Boca Raton, Florida on 30 March 1976. They were not producers at that point. They were foreign-sales agents, which meant they took finished films and sold the distribution rights country by country, and the two of them knew that business well enough to see the arbitrage sitting in it. If you could sell the rights to a film in twenty territories before it existed, on the strength of a star and a poster, the film was financed before a camera turned.

First Blood in 1982 proved the method. A Vietnam veteran picture that every major studio had passed on cost around fifteen million dollars and took over a hundred and twenty worldwide, and it gave them a franchise. Rambo: First Blood Part II in 1985 was one of the biggest films of the decade. Rambo III in 1988 cost about sixty three million and was, briefly, the most expensive film ever made. Carolco became a public company and Kassar became the figure Cannes buyers waited for, the man who could close a nine-figure deal in a hotel bar during the market.

Vajna sold his half in 1989 for something over a hundred million dollars after a long disagreement about where the company was going, and went off to start Cinergi. Kassar kept the machine running at a higher altitude. Total Recall in 1990 took $261 million. Terminator 2 in 1991 carried a $102 million budget, the first film ever to pass a hundred million. It returned $519 million worldwide. Basic Instinct followed in 1992. In the middle of that run, in the same year as Terminator 2, the company reported a loss of $265.1 million.

The hits were enormous and the company lost money anyway, because the pre-sale model gives the upside away in advance. Foreign distributors had bought their territories at a fixed price before release, so a film that tripled expectations paid them and not Carolco. By 1995 the studio was selling off pieces of itself, and on 10 November it filed for Chapter 11 with a plan to sell the library to 20th Century Fox for $50 million.

~ the record ~

~ the blockbuster years ~

For about eight years Carolco produced the kind of film that defined what a big movie looked like. These were the loud expensive ones, with one recognizable face on the poster and an effects budget that was the actual selling point. Terminator 2 alone is why the liquid metal shot exists in the visual vocabulary of everyone who was alive in 1991.

Those films landed in Turkey with a delay and then landed hard. Private television arrived here in 1990 and the new channels needed hundreds of hours of programming a week that they could dub cheaply and run repeatedly, and American action pictures were exactly that. Somebody my age who was ten years old in 1994 met Rambo and the Terminator on a Turkish channel on a Sunday afternoon, dubbed into Turkish and cut for length, and then met them again the following month. Carolco's films were the wallpaper of that decade without anybody here knowing the name of the company that made them.

The studio also carried real prestige on the side of its ledger, financing Oliver Stone and Adrian Lyne and picking up the occasional serious credit. None of it changed the arithmetic. The expensive films had to keep getting more expensive to keep the pre-sales interesting, and each round raised the number that the next film had to clear.

~ the pirate movie ~

Cutthroat Island opened on 22 December 1995. It cost around $98 million and took $10 million in the United States, and Guinness listed it in 2012 as the biggest box-office loss ever recorded. It is remembered as the film that sank a studio, and it did not: the Chapter 11 petition had been filed six weeks earlier, on 10 November, while the picture was still in post-production. Carolco had to finish it because the foreign financing was already committed and walking away would have triggered the claims sooner. The flop is a consequence of the collapse that people have been reading backward for thirty years.

~ who owns the name now ~

The Fox deal did not close. Canal+ bought the library in March 1996 for about $58 million, which is why Terminator 2 and Basic Instinct both carry a StudioCanal card in front of them today, and why the Terminator rights have been through so many hands since. Kassar and Vajna both kept working. Vajna eventually went home to Hungary and ran the country's film commission until his death in 2019.

In January 2015 a small public company called Brick Top Productions renamed itself Carolco Pictures and hired Kassar as a development executive, which lasted until April 2016. StudioCanal took control of the name the following year and the shell became Recall Studios. The marks have been quiet since, which means the only working piece of Carolco left is the catalog, sitting with a French owner who bought it for less than the cost of one of the films in it.

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