It was only a few years ago that Focus Features was the “art house” division of Universal Pictures. The studio was responsible for films like Brokeback Mountain, Beginners, and Greenberg. While Focus still churns out a fair amount of drama-focused material, a shift occurred in 2013 when Universal decided to fold its genre arm FilmDistrict into Focus and replace the head of Focus with the former FilmDistrict head Peter Schlessel.
This move has resulted in a more genre-leaning bent at Focus over the past two years, but it appears that things are changing once more at the studio. It was announced today that Focus Features has revived the Gramercy Pictures label “as branding for boldly imagined action, horror, and sci-fi genre movies.” Gramercy was initially formed in 1992 as an art-house labeled and put out a string of cult classics, including Dazed and Confused and The Big Lebwoski. The new iteration of Gramercy will be home to the former Focus titles Insidious: Chapter 3, Self/Less, Sinister 2, London Has Fallen, The Forest, and the video game adaptation Ratchet & Clank, which will be released on April 29, 2016.
Essentially Gramercy will be the new FilmDistrict, and with this bevy of Focus titles moving over to the genre arm, I’m curious to see what kinds of films Focus chooses to spearhead going forward. Officially, the studio’s commitment is to a “broad spectrum of entertainment that encompasses both commercial and specialty fare.”
You can check out the new Gramercy Pictures logo in the video below, which has the full lineup of the inaugural slate.
