Sony Pictures

Columbia Pictures.. Sony Pictures.. tomato, tomaahto, just pick one, dammit!

Type	Someone's bitch
Founded	1919 (as Corned Beef and Cabbage studios) 1924 (as Columbia Pictures) 1989 (as Sony Pictures)
Founder(s)	A bunch of horny conmen bros
Headquarters	The basement of Sony, in the basement of Uncyclopedia, Culver City, CA
Key people	Tom Rothman (CEO) Lady Columbia (mascot, namesake, and minor shareholder) Adam Sandler (former content creator)
Industry	Movies, TV shows, scary logos, debt
Revenue	-$100,000 000,000
Owner(s)	Sony

Columbia Pictures, AKA Sony Pictures, apparently, is an all-American film studio, featuring an all-American mascot, that is now owned by Japanese conglomerate Sony as part of Japan's new strategy to brainwash Americans in retaliation for World War II. Bummer for America, small victory for Japan.

Starting off as a tiny underdog studio, Columbia fought nail and tooth the American way and made it big with a handful of hits, but took advantage of the advent of television to really take off, though they couldn't afford rent and had to crash in the basement of another studio. They were then bought by a fucking soda company in the 1980s, before Japan, using all the sweet money America gave them to recover from the war, paid Sony to buy them.

Columbia/Sony is now one of the "Big Five" American studios, albeit having sold their soul to those darned Japs to do so. Despite this, it remains widely speculated that their execs may have made a deal with the devil, as the studio has badly bungled several major decisions since their "glory days" of the 1990s and 2000s ended. The studio is known for certain film franchises like Men in Black, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, Adam Sandler movies until 2020 or something, rom coms and chick flicks for dayz, and hit-or-miss Spider-Man movies. They are also known for being incredibly indecisive, whether it is in choosing their name and logo, deciding how to plan their film franchises, deciding whether or not to focus on film or television, and setting the tone of their movies.

Pre-Sony days as Columbia Pictures

Scrappy early days

The studio was first formed by a bunch of former conmen who happened to be brothers. Needing a surname, they took on the last name "Cohn". The Cohn brothers were so poor that all they had to eat was corned beef and cabbage, and the corned beef only came once a week. Naturally, they named their studio CBC Studios, short for "Corned Beef and Cabbage Studios". The studio also reeked like corned beef and cabbage and were the laughingstock of all of Hollywood due to being stuck in Poverty Row.

Rebrand

Having been rejected as a partner by her brothers at Warner Bros., Dot Warner stormed down the street and found the Cohn brothers struggling to make a cent in their "corned beef and cabbage" studio, giving the brothers some good ideas that she had stolen from Warners.

Dot tried to make herself the face of the new studio, but tired of her nagging and bullshit, the Cohn bros found another reject, Lady Columbia, who had been struggling since Uncle Sam dumped her in favor of a blonde, inanimate, torch-bearing French immigrant as both his wife and the female mascot of the United States. They signed a deal with Lady C to make her the face of the company instead, and so "Corned Beef and Cabbage Studios" was renamed "Columbia Pictures" with Lady C as the mascot, though the Cohn brothers, being slightly ignorant and misogynistic, made her pose like Uncle Sam's dumb, blonde, inanimate new wife for the studio logo.

Angry she had been shunned again, Dot threw a hissy fit and stormed off once again. Rumor has it that she changed her name to Rupert Murdoch and bought 20th Century Fox years later.

Early success

The newly minted Columbia Pictures produced a small number of raunchy hits featuring the Three Stooges and other stars like Rita Hayward, and eventually made enough money and clout that co-president Harry Cohn got all the bitches. Harry even got so many bitches that he started treating them a certain way. Unfortunately, Dot, still spiteful over her last failed ventures, told on both the Cohn and Warner brothers, and both Columbia and Warner Bros. were put in timeout for being too raunchy as the new Hollywood Code was implemented.

To boost morale for the United States during World War II, Lady Columbia herself enlisted with the Navy and Marines in the Pacific Theater, but was unfortunately overshadowed by Uncle Sam and Bob Hope also enlisting in Europe. The men also let all the Army grunts do all the hard work and were simply there to look cool, while Lady C took on the Japanese in the roughest hand-to-hand fighting, never to be credited for her contributions, as it went to the dudes fighting along her side.

TV era

AHHHH! IT'S FROM HELLLLLL!

Struggling to find new sources of income, Columbia Pictures had to move in with Warner Bros. and share an apartment. While their roommates kept making movies under Jacko Warner, Columbia discovered TV was a thing and started making shitty soap operas and cartoons under their new "Screen Gems" division. This kept the struggling studio afloat and made quite a lot of money from soap companies paying for their shows, gradually affording them the chance to make better TV shows such as "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jennie". Unfortunately, the marketing department for Screen Gems fucked up by unwittingly selling their soul to Satan and thereby making their TV logo the creepy "S from Hell", unintentionally giving their intended audience in children endless nightmares of being kidnapped and raped by that terribly animated and drawn logo and creepy synth music to go along with it.

"Scream Gems", as it would later become known, became so unmarketable due to the "S from Hell" logo that Columbia eventually had to stick their old "Lady C cosplaying as Lady Liberty" logo over it and rename their TV department simply "Columbia Pictures Television". Unfortunately they forgot to change out the creepy music so even their marketable mascot got possessed and started giving some people nightmares.

Cocaine Coke era

With both Jack and Harry Cohn having bit the dust in the 50s and still needing bright ideas to remain profitable outside of television, Columbia's executives started snorting cocaine and psychedelics, leading to several interesting choices such as Taxi Driver and Heavy Metal, the latter of which actually played out like a drug trip.

Truly desperate when the studio's net worth plummeted to $1, the execs sold Columbia to Coca-Cola, who paid $100,000 for the struggling studio. The execs eagerly took the offer due to "Coca-Cola" sounding almost like the word "cocaine" and the money, while still being cheap for buying a Hollywood studio, funding enough cocaine to last them a month. The execs were found dead two days later, with half a month's worth of "snow" found within their bodies during the autopsy.

With a movie studio now in their portfolio, Coca-Cola began implementing subliminal messaging into each Columbia film that was released in the 1980s. Fortunately for them, films like Ghostbusters and The Karate Kid proved massively successful, also leading to an increase in childhood obesity in American audiences as soda consumption went up.

Sony era

Part I: SUCCESS

Surprise! It's Sony Pictures now

After some coke-fueled years of moderate success with their new movie studio in the 1980s, Coca-Cola lost their groove and ran out of ideas, selling off Columbia Pictures to their side project, Tri-Star Pictures and leading to everyone wondering what in the world a "Columbia TriStar" was.

Still salty at having been ignored for her efforts in World War II, Lady Columbia, as the studio's representative, secretly brokered a deal with Sony to sell the former All-American movie studio to Japan's rising new mega-conglomerate. With the new infusion of foreign Japanese money, Columbia TriStar was renamed "Sony Pictures", bought out MGM's old studio lot in Culver City, and underwent a massive overhaul. Under Sony's early ownership, the studio made several giant blockbuster hits like Bad Boys, Air Force One, Stuart Little, and the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies, even making Adam Sandler, Will Smith, and Nic fuckin' Cage into viable movie stars, thus cementing themselves as a Hollywood powerhouse. Now who's laughing?

Part II: What the fuck are they doing??

Unfortunately, success was fleeting once the 2010s arrived, as Sony boggled everyone with several huge flops, blunders, or flat out stupid decisions, worse than Gigli, Ghost Rider, or Sandler's later films:

Selling off their own in-house streaming service

Once upon a time, Sony had their own streaming service called "Crackle", possibly in homage to all their executives being on crack in the past. They also steamed every one of their films for $FREE.99! That was their first mistake. Their second was selling it off to the company behind Chicken Soup for the Soul instead of monetizing it. Now Sony has to waste money to stream their films to Netflix and Disney+.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

In principal, it was a good movie.. if you only focused on Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone's performances and romance and Hans Zimmer's score. You can ignore the obvious studio interference, overstuffed and confusing plot, overstuffed number of villains teasing a shared universe independent of the main Marvel Universe, cringeworthy acting by Dane DeHaan, and evident egos of Amy Pascal and Avi Arad. In fact, the drama got so bad that Andrew Garfield got hammered and unintentionally offended management while hammered, forcing them to fire him and start from scratch.

2014 hack by Kim Jong-Un

In 2014, James Franco and Seth Rogen insisted on making The Interview, a film that poked Kim Jong Un in the ego and ticklish fatboy belly. Their first mistake was in making Kim Jong Un too funny and chill, not the intimidating figure he sees himself as. The second mistake was in making Kim's death in the movie too "happy" and bloody, enraging the glorious leader and turning Sony Pictures into a natural target. The third was that Sony's cybersecurity sucked ass, and the admin password was literally "passw0rd". As a result, the hackers, who were totally not acting on North Korea's behalf, stole all of Sony's secrets, including the fact that no one in management knew what they were doing, that they were about to sell Spider-Man's soul back to Marvel, the sexual preferences of all its executives, and the location of their cocaine stash, and spoilers to every single Sony film to be released over the next 100 years. Sony was truly caught with their pants down.

Woke Ghostbusters reboot

Seriously, you're just going to remake a classic film by gender swapping all the characters with mediocre comedic actresses? How many more Ghostbusters movies can you even make?

Morbius

Clearly the filmiest film of all time, Sony's only regret was it released the film when everyone was busy or sick. And then it re-released it when everyone was sick again. Get with the times!

In fact, it was so successful that Sony intends to release the sequel "Morbius 2: More Bius."

Overworking everyone on Beyond the Spider-Verse

After finally making a good animated movie with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, they made a sequel, Across the Spider-Verse which did pretty darn well too! They then decided to release the third film one day after Across the Spider-Verse and demanded overnight work for all its animators, causing them all to quit or blow their brains out, either from actual suicide or their brains going "a splode" from the surprise. Now lacking animators capable of doing two years of work in one day, let alone animators of any capability, Sony Animation then decided to use A.I. to finish the movie, to disastrous results, forcing them to start from scratch. Looks like we'll have to wait even longer for Beyond the Spider-Verse all because they decided to rush it.

Madame Web

So this abomination of a movie was the one they wasted their special "100th Anniversary logo" on? What a shame.

Spider-Man-free Spider-Verse

Wait.. they made a whole shared universe based on obscure Spider-Man villains like Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter WITHOUT the web-slinger himself?? Of course this shared universe is doomed to fail and lose money!

Future

With this continued new plethora of dumb decisions, Sony Pictures is losing more money than Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox did before their buyouts. However, due to being vertically integrated into a money-making conglomerate, they're doing fine and are free to keep wasting money.

Divisions

• Sony Pictures Motion Pictures Group: Formerly the "Columbia TriStar Motion Pictures Group", this was the result of combining Columbia and TriStar together. Marketing couldn't decide what to call the combined company, so they slapped both names and logos together instead of just having the darn lady ride the pegasus for one simple logo before rebranding it as Sony Pictures to solve the issue.
  • Columbia Pictures: Columbia lives on as the "flagship" label of Sony, but a shell of its former glory. Surprisingly, cancel culture hasn't tried to force Sony to rename it to something not inspired by Christopher Columbus and get rid of its Caucasian, female mascot for not being "politically correct," like they did to Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemina, and the Land o' Lakes Indian girl
    • Ghostbusters subdivision: stop trying to make it happen! Ghostbusters is NOT a viable answer to the Marvel Cinematic Universe!
  • TriStar Pictures: literally just a shell of itself, even more so than Columbia. Somehow still makes one film a year or distributes a random one if it can't make one
  • Scream Screen Gems: inspired by its horrific, demon-possessed logo, Scream Gems was revived in 1998 and now lives up to its name by making cheap, shitty horror movies for the most part
  • Sony Pictures Classics: a niche films label that just exists
  • Sony Pictures Animation: like its parent studio, spent its early years in the basement, making forgettable movies before striking it rich with the Spider-Verse movies and K-pop Demon Hunters
  • Affirm Films: To ward off any suspicion that they made deals with the devil in the past, Sony has a Christian movies label, but all they do is buy the distribution rights to independently-made Christian flicks and advise them not to go too cheesy. As a result, Affirm films, while still slightly preachy, are actually self-aware and palatable, unlike anything Kirk Cameron has put out as of late..
• Sony Pictures TV: the successor of the original Scream Gems, Columbia Pictures TV, Columbia TriStar TV, and however the fuck many TV labels there were, Sony TV makes Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and a crapton of assorted TV and streaming series. Sure would have helped if they had their own streaming service, ya know?
• Streaming service: currently vacant
• Crunchy Roll: anime, baby!