CJ Entertainment (
Hangul: CJ 엔터테인먼트) is a South Korean film production and distribution company under
CJ ENM. The company operates as a film production company, film publishing house, investment and exhibition.
History
During early 1995, Cheil Jedang invested in the upstart film company
DreamWorks SKG, and in June of the same year, Cheil Jedang established Multimedia Division. The division's later changed to CJ Entertainment in September, in time for their first film distribution deal with the movie ''
Secrets and Lies''. To aid their position in the film distribution industry CJ Entertainment built the first
multiplexes
In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource - a ...
of Korea with the first one, CGV Gangbyeon 11, opening in April 1998.
CJ Entertainment's importance in the Korean film industry grew in 1997–1998 when the nation was caught in the wave of the
Asian financial crisis. Many smaller film companies had to close up, leaving the road open for CJ Entertainment to capitalize on the new-found popularity of
Korean cinema brought on by the success of ''
Shiri'' in 1999.
In January 2000, CJ Entertainment Inc was officially founded, and the first film ''
Chunhyang'' to be distributed.
The success of their own films after the 2000 film ''Chunhyang'', most notably ''
Joint Security Area'' that broke the Korean box-office records previously set by ''Shiri'', helped the company grow into one of the two largest film companies in the country along with
Kang Woo-suk
Kang Woo-suk (born November 10, 1960 in Gyeongsan) is a South Korean film producer and director. He has often been called the most powerful man in Korean cinema, topping Cine21 magazine's list of '50 Most Powerful Men in Korean Cinema' for seven ...
's
Cinema Service. Lately CJ Entertainment has expanded into other fields of entertainment industry, including
Internet and
Cable TV
Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with broadc ...
businesses.
From 2007 until 2015, CJ Entertainment was the Korean distributor for films by
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film and television production company, production and Distribution (marketing), distribution company and the main namesake division of Paramount Global (formerly ViacomCBS). It is the fifth-oldes ...
, including films by DreamWorks which were bought by Paramount, as
Universal Studios had taken over the Korean branch of its joint venture with Paramount,
United International Pictures. CJ had already been distributing DreamWorks films for nearly a decade as a result of investing in the studio. It holds the highest market share among the distributors at 27.8 percent.
In 2010, CJ Entertainment was merged with CJ Media, M-net Media, On Media and CJ Internet to form the entertainment & media subsidiary CJ E&M. Since then, CJ Entertainment operates as a company under CJ E&M.
As July 2018, CJ Entertainment's parent company CJ E&M merged into new company CJ ENM as a result CJ Entertainment operates under the new company since then.
Films
See also
*
List of Korean-language films
*
Cinema of Korea
*
Contemporary culture of South Korea
References
External links
American website
{{Authority control
Film distributors of South Korea
Film production companies of South Korea
Mass media companies established in 1995
Companies based in Seoul
South Korean companies established in 1995