Touchstone Pictures

Touchstone Pictures is an American film production company and one of several film distribution banners of The Walt Disney Studios, owned by The Walt Disney Company.

Pre-founding
Taste for older children had shifted and teens began to shun G-rated films. Due to increased public assumption that Disney films were aimed at children, films produced by the Walt Disney Studios began to falter at the box office as a result. In late 1979, Walt Disney Productions released The Black Hole, a science-fiction movie that was the studio's first production to receive a PG rating (the company, however, had already distributed its first PG-rated film, Take Down—without the Disney moniker visible—almost a year before the release of The Black Hole). Over the next few years, Disney experimented with more PG-rated fare, such as the 1981 film Condorman. With Disney's 1982 slate of PG-rated films—including the horror-mystery The Watcher in the Woods, the thriller drama Night Crossing, and the science-fiction film Tron—the company lost over $27 million. Tron was considered a potential Star Wars-level success film by the film division. A loss of $33 million was registered by the film division in 1983 with the majority resulting from Something Wicked This Way Comes, a horror-fantasy adaptation of Ray Bradbury's novel. Never Cry Wolf, a 1983 PG release did well as the studio downplayed the film's association with the Disney brand.

Label
Following the success of the Disney-branded PG-13 rated Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl in 2003, and other films that in the 1980s and '90s would have been assigned to the Touchstone (or Hollywood Pictures and Miramax Films) label, Disney has decided to weigh distribution of films more toward Disney-branded films and away from Touchstone Pictures, though not entirely disbanding them as it is continues to regularly employ the Touchstone label for R and most PG-13 rated fare.

In 2006, Disney limited Touchstone's output in favor of Walt Disney Pictures titles due to an increase in film industry costs. Disney revived Touchstone in 2009 to serve as a distribution label for DreamWorks Studios' films. Following Disney's decision not to renew their long-standing deal with Jerry Bruckheimer Films in 2013, producer Jerry Bruckheimer revealed that he insisted on revitalizing the Touchstone label for production. Disney was uninterested, with studio chairman Alan Horn admitting that Touchstone's production output had been reduced to DreamWorks' films. In addition to DreamWorks' films, Touchstone has also released non Disney-branded animated films such as Gnomeo & Juliet, The Wind Rises and Strange Magic.

Notable films
Some well-known Touchstone Pictures releases include Beaches, Splash, The Color of Money, Ernest Goes to Camp, Adventures in Babysitting, Good Morning, Vietnam, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Dead Poets Society, Pretty Woman, Dick Tracy, Sister Act, When a Man Loves a Woman, Rushmore, The Insider, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Prestige, The Proposal, The Help, War Horse, and Lincoln. Its highest-grossing film release is Armageddon. Although animated films are primarily released by Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone's animated releases include the original theatrical release of The Nightmare Before Christmas, Gnomeo & Juliet, The Wind Rises, and Strange Magic. Five Touchstone films have received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture; Dead Poets Society, The Insider, The Help, War Horse, and Lincoln.