| Fate | Shut down |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1967 (as The Hemdale Company) |
| Defunct | 1995 |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom Los Angeles, California, USA[1] |
| Key people | David Hemmings John Daly Derek Gibson |
| Products | movies VHS tapes |
Hemdale Film Corporation, known as Hemdale Communications after 1993, was an independent film production company and distributor founded in London in 1967 as the Hemdale Company by actor David Hemmings and his manager, John Daly. Hemdale was initially founded as a talent agency that helped launch the careers of such bands as Black Sabbath and Yes.[2] However, after Hemmings left the company in 1971, Daly purchased the rest of the company and refocused Hemdale as a film studio. Originally a producer and distributor of British films, Hemdale relocated to Hollywood in 1980.[3] Derek Gibson later joined the company.
Despite these critical and commercial successes, Hemdale followed these films up with a series of box office bombs and the company eventually declared bankruptcy.[4]
In 1991, Eric Parkinson joined Hemdale as president of the company, eventually shutting down its production facilities and duties, and started acquiring and distributing films independently produced by other people.
In 1995, Hemdale shut its doors, shortly after it was announced that Daly and Gibson would leave the company.[5] The library was then incorporated into Consortium de Realisation, a French holding company set up to handle the rights to titles acquired by Credit Lyonnais Bank.
After the studio's closing, the Hemdale library was incorporated into the Orion Pictures output now owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, after MGM acquired the Consortium de Realisation library from PolyGram. Orion ironically originally released many of Hemdale's films. One key exception is The Last Emperor, a Hemdale production originally issued by Columbia Pictures, but whose rights are now held by its producer, Jeremy Thomas. Most of the outside productions Hemdale distributed have subsequently returned to their original owners (such as Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, which producer Tokyo Movie Shinsha now controls worldwide).
In 1991, Hemdale created a collection of many video cassette titles released by Hemdale Home Video, which was formed by Parkinson, around the United States of America. In 1995, the video rights to some of Hemdale's higher-profile titles were licensed to LIVE Entertainment (now Lionsgate).
The company's last new credit was for the Virgin Games video game adaptation of The Terminator, which showed up on the game's start up screen as "Hemdale's The Terminator" in text on the scrolling logo, despite all box art calling it "The Terminator".
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