Background
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 name 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; 1982's Tron and Tex (which featured scenes of teenagers smoking marijuana) and 1983's Never Cry Wolf (which featured male nudity) and Trenchcoat. The latter film attracted major criticism for including adult themes that were considered inappropriate for a Disney film. At the same time, the Disney name was strongly associated with children's films, and may have adversely affected the box-office performance of films aimed at an older audience, such as The Devil and Max Devlin and Tron.
Started by then-Disney CEO Ron W. Miller in 1984, Touchstone's first film was Splash, a huge hit for Walt Disney Productions, grossing $68 million at the domestic boxoffice. Splash included brief rear nudity on the part of star Daryl Hannah and occasional inappropriate language, earning a PG-rating. This label was known as Touchstone Films until the film Ruthless People. Because of its success, yet another Disney film label was started in 1990, Hollywood Pictures, with the release of Arachnophobia.
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) label, Disney has decided to weigh distribution of films more toward Disney-branded films and away from Touchstone films, though not entirely disbanding them as it is continues to regularly employ the Touchstone label for R and most PG-13 rated fare.
Read more about this topic: Touchstone Pictures
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