Deluxe Entertainment Services Inc., often referred to as Deluxe, is an American content company. Clients include motion-picture groups, television studios, digital content providers and advertising agencies. The company has been recognized with 10 Academy Awards for scientific and technical achievement, including developments in CinemaScope pictures and, more recently, for a process of creating archival separations from digital image data. Founded in 1915 by producer William Fox, Deluxe's headquarters are in Los Angeles and New York, with operations in 25 media markets worldwide.
History
Deluxe began as a film processing laboratory which was part of a conglomeration owned and operated by producer William Fox in the early 1900s. Fox established the De Luxe laboratory in 1915 as part of the Fox Film Corporation in Fort Lee, New Jersey. In 1916, Fox Film Corporation opened its studio in Hollywood at Sunset and Western. The first Deluxe film laboratory on the west coast was built on the south side of the lot, and in 1919 the laboratory was moved to the new Fox studios building on Manhattan's west side where it remained for over 40 years. The "business manager" of the laboratory was Alan E. Freedman who guided the company into the 1960s. During the depression, the Fox Film Corporation encountered financial difficulties. Among the actions taken to maintain liquidity, Fox sold the laboratories in 1932 to Freedman who renamed the operation Deluxe. Under Freedman's leadership, Deluxe added two more plants in Chicago and Toronto. In January, 1934, Fox was granted an option to rebuy DeLuxe prior to Dec. 31, 1938. 20th Century Fox exercised this option in July, 1936 with Freedman remaining as president. Under Freedman's direction, innovations, including the processing and sound striping of Cinemascope, were developed and implemented. Many of those were patented and/or received Academy awards. After Freedman's retirement in 1962, Deluxe continued expanding into new technological marketplaces, entering the home entertainment marketplace in 1972 and accommodating digital technologies throughout the next few decades. With the decline of motion picture production on the east coast, Deluxe closed its New York plant in the 1960s. The Chicago and Toronto plants followed. In recent years Deluxe expanded to a high capacity manufacturing plant that was one of several film labs worldwide. The Los Angeles plant continued to operate until May 2014, when it, like all other large film processing plants, succumbed to the motion picture industry's conversion from film to digital production. In 2012, Centro has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Deluxe Entertainment Services Group. Deluxe partnered with the Academy Film Archive in 2014 to find a home for thousands of orphaned film elements from the shutdown of Deluxe’s historic Hollywood film labs. The Deluxe Laboratories Collection at the AcademyFilm Archive consists of over 7,500 35mm and 16mm film elements of various motion pictures dating back to the early 1960s. Deluxe was owned by MacAndrews & Forbes from 2006 to 2019, when the company was acquired by creditors in a debt-for-equity swap in September 2019. The company was acquired by MacAndrews & Forbes from The Rank Organisation for $750 million, its owner since 1990. The company filed for bankruptcy on October 3, 2019. The bankruptcy is pending in the Southern District of New York. On October 24, 2019, the company received court approval to emerge from bankruptcy with a comprehensive restructuring plan. On July 1, 2020, Platinum Equity agreed to acquire Deluxe's distribution business. Former Deluxe CEO Cyril Drabinsky, who left the company in 2016 to found distributor CineVizion, will return to the company, merging CineVizion’s assets into Deluxe. The purchase does not include Deluxe's creative businesses.
