Independents owned by Studios, an oxymoron.

A while ago Western Film played a film which was distributed by a new company whose name I thought was ironic.

With media companies Independent is generally thought of as being separate from the big conglomerates, this applies to both movies and music.

A while ago when it became apparent Independent companies could make some real money producing and distributing smaller, usually art house type prestige pics. The big studios started buying up the small ones. One of the first was Disney buying Miramax which had a proven track record of releasing Oscar winning films. Warner brought up New Line which started with horror movies but eventually moved into more prestige pics.

So now pretty much any 'independent" company is owned by a Studio, Universal owns Focus which released Brokeback Mountain.

There's a couple that are still Independent as far as I know. Lion's Gate which started in Canada made Crash. The brothers who started Miramax left and started a company called The Weinstein Company.

There's several small companies in Canada that are still independent, Mongrel Media and Equinox. Alliance and Odeon distribute the majority of the arthouse and some of the Hollywood stuff in Canada.

The film reference at the beginning of the post was A Scanner Darkly. It was distributed by Warner Independent. Warner is the largest media company in the word with revenues of something like 40 billion a year. Talk about an oxymoron.