The Hidden Meaning Behind These Movie Logos

Founded in 1918 by siblings Harry and Jack Cohn and friend Joel Brandt as CBC Film Sales Corporation, Columbia Pictures is one of the oldest studios in Hollywood. In its early years, the studio mostly churned out low-budget fare, leading the Cohns and Brandt to re-brand themselves in 1924 as the more sophisticated-sounding Columbia Pictures. Their name and torch-bearing female logo refer to Lady Columbia, which is the mostly forgotten female symbol of the United States. Before there was Uncle Sam, there was Lady Columbia in her patriotic robes and armor, leading the way for America.

The studio has always used an image of a woman with a torch. The most recent iteration was designed by painter Michael Deas in 1992 during a massive reorganization of the studio. The original Lady Columbia was draped in an American flag, but Deas was told to change the color scheme to white, orange, and blue. (In a 2013 interview, Deas said he couldn't remember whether it was due to legal or trademark issues.) On the suggestion of a mutual friend, he asked Jenny Joseph, a graphic artist at The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, to be his model. The photo shoot lasted four hours, and Deas used the resulting images for his iconic painting. It's the only time Joseph has ever modeled, but millions of people have seen her face for the last 25 years every time they go to the movies. Not a bad torch to bear.

The oldest studio still headquartered in Hollywood and the second oldest film studio in the United States, Paramount is the result of a merger between several smaller studios. In 1912, Adolph Zucker founded Famous Players Film Company with the intent to produce feature-length films with leading stage actors of the day. A few years later in 1914, Jesse Lasky founded the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, teaming with future legendary director Cecil B. DeMille for The Squaw Man, the first feature film shot in Hollywood. Zukor, Lasky, DeMille, and Samuel Goldwyn joined forces in 1916 and merged with a growing distribution company founded by W.W. Hodkinson called Paramount Pictures to form Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation.

Legend has it that the mountainous logo came from a sketch Hodkinson drew himself. The Utah-based distributor often saw the Wasatch range and decided to use one of its peaks for his company's calling card. The stars were added later after Paramount's merger with Famous Players and Lasky Feature Play Company to represent the first 22 stars contracted by the company. The number of stars has gone up and down a little, but it's usually had 22 stars encircling the mountain peak. The logo has undergone a few subtle changes over the years, but the infamous mountain and stars largely remains the same. The current logo was created in 2012 to celebrate the studio's 100th anniversary.

Conceived in 1982 as a joint venture between CBS, HBO, and Columbia Pictures to split rising filmmaking costs, TriStar pictures didn't have a name or logo until 1984. Founder Victor Kaufman and his family always loved horses, so he chose the pegasus as a symbol of the kinds of movies he hoped to make and to celebrate his love for the animal. Studio adviser and filmmaker Sydney Pollack "loaned" Kaufman the running horse image from his film, The Electric Horseman, for the first TriStar logo, transposing it from black to white. The logo was updated in 1992 for the studio's 10th anniversary, debuting before 1993's Sleepless in Seattle. The new logo featured CGI, painting, footage of clouds from Hawaii, and an updated pegasus image. The wings were created using real feathers and CGI, then added to footage of the horse that had been shot in a hangar at the Santa Monica airport. In 2015, TriStar's parent company, Sony, commissioned a VFX company to do an update to make the logo fully computer-generated and look better in HD formats.

Founded in 2000 by billionaire businessman Thomas Tull, the relatively young studio has emerged as a major Hollywood player over the last 17 years. In 2005, Legendary made a deal with Warner Bros. to co-produce and finance films starting with Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. The company struck a similar deal with Universal in 2014 and has made upward of $12 billion in box office grosses worldwide. Legendary's twisting logo is based on the ancient Celtic shield knot, which symbolizes protection, unity, and eternity because of its seemingly unending interlocking lines. Legendary is best known for epic films like 300, Clash of the Titans, Warcraft, and superhero fare like The Dark Knight trilogy, so its logo conjures images of heroic stories about ancient cultures or fantastical places. Unsurprisingly, Legendary is aiming to feel, well, legendary.

In 1994, Hollywood moguls Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen joined together to form DreamWorks, a new live-action and animation studio meant to rival major studios like Universal, Warner Bros., and Paramount. As such, Spielberg envisioned a logo that would reflect the Golden Age Hollywood feel the new company was hoping to evoke in its films. Spielberg came up with the image of a man fishing from the moon and commissioned painter Robert Hunt to render it. Hunt suggested the fisherman instead be a boy and modeled the image after his own son. The "SKG" text was added to recognize DreamWorks' three founders: Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen. There have been slight variations over the years, including the current CGI version which features music from longtime Spielberg collaborator John Williams. However, the boy fishing from the moon remains a fixture of DreamWorks, unlike founders Katzenberg and Geffen. Geffen has effectively retired, and Katzenberg took over the animation wing as a separate company in 2004.