How Columbia Pictures Kept Its Cool for a Century

On a recent July afternoon, the ever-mercurial Tom Rothman arrives in good spirits for a tour of Columbia Pictures’ archives in honor of the studio’s 100th anniversary. “Ask a lot of questions, because after this, I must go back to work,” says Rothman, Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group chairman. “This is way more fun than getting yelled at by agents.”

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Naturally, Rothman — one of Hollywood’s longest-running studio chiefs, who’s been in his current gig since 2015 and has overseen the most profitable period in Columbia’s recent history — starts off by noting the costumes from marquee franchise Spider-Man. By his calculation, the collection houses more than 30 superhero suits at the archive from various Spider-Man movies.

“I recognize this very well — it was worth $2 billion at the box office to us,” says Rothman, pointing to a suit worn by Tom Holland in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home . Both that film and 2017’s box office hit Spider-Man: Homecoming were made and released during his tenure in tandem with Marvel and Rothman’s onetime Sony predecessor, producer Amy Pascal.

“We have never put one [suit] out to auction. But obviously Spider-Man is one of the most culturally iconic characters that exists in the history of movies and would be very valuable. Someday we may,” says Rothman. “We see a lot of items that have gone missing from the end of a shoot that appear online, and the value is very significant. I recently saw some Star Wars memorabilia being offered; it depends how iconic the movie and the item within the movie was.”

Spider-Man is the tip of the iceberg of decades’ worth of props, costumes, shoes, posters and photography that, combined, chart the story of how a scrappy studio founded by brothers Harry and Jack Cohn with business partner Joe Brandt in 1924 was transformed into a Hollywood hitmaker that is now one of the last four majors still standing.

The archives are housed in a nondescript Sony outpost several miles from the main studio lot in Culver City that was previously home to MGM. Near the entrance is an ornate gold-painted, red velvet-covered throne from The Da Vinci Code . In another room is a sprawling model of the mountain used by director Steven Spielberg for panning shots in Close Encounters of the Third Kind .

The archives are a fascinating work-in-progress. Little of the studio’s history had been saved by the time Japanese electronics giant Sony bought Columbia in 1989 after a string of owners (see timeline below). Sony immediately launched a campaign to retrieve what it could, and today, more than a million artifacts from the studio’s past are being carefully preserved for history. About half are posters and photos nestled in boxes lining rows and rows of shelves. Wandering around the climate-controlled bunker, the film chief is like a kid in a candy store. “Here is a very little-known movie called Rocket Gibraltar . I have worked on over 500 motion pictures as a studio executive, and this was my first one,” says Rothman, who arrived at the studio in 1987 under the tutelage of the widely admired Dawn Steel, who that year was named president of Columbia Pictures, the first female studio head in that position. “It’s a lovely little family film which absolutely no one saw, but which I highly recommend. It was also Macaulay Culkin’s first and Burt Lancaster’s last film. And it was Kevin Spacey’s first film, but that’s for another story.”

Rothman pokes around box after box of memorabilia from such classics as The Way We Were , Shampoo , Taxi Driver , A River Runs Through It and A Few Good Men , pausing wistfully at the contents of one long drawer. Examining a poster for David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia — the movie that made him want to work in Hollywood in the first place — the studio chair says, “I saw the movie when I was 12 and thought I had seen the hand of God. ‘If only somehow I could be part of that magic.’ ”

Since its inception, Sony has amassed 12 best picture Oscars, a record for a Hollywood studio, beginning with Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night . The romantic screwball comedy, which debuted in 1934, put the Cohns’ foundering studio on the map. “Without three people, there would be no Columbia: Frank Capra, Rita Hayworth and Harry Cohn,” Rothman says.

Hayworth’s presence looms large over the archives. Framed film posters and photos of the star are scattered about on shelves and walls. In May, Rothman arranged for a restored print of Gilda — her breakout 1946 film co-starring Glenn Ford — to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival as part of a 100th anniversary celebration.

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For years, Harry Cohn had been unable to get top stars on contract and would have to borrow them from other studios, prompting MGM’s Louis B. Mayer to nickname Columbia “Siberia” and to send stars there as punishment. All that changed with the advent of Hayworth, Cary Grant ( His Girl Friday ) and Jimmy Stewart ( Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ).

Like Cohn, Rothman has developed close relationships with top stars and filmmakers. He won a fierce bidding war for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood . “It was one of the greatest working relationships I’ve ever had making a movie,” says Tarantino. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re the only game in town. He’s the only studio executive out there committed to the theatrical experience and getting asses in seats. Also, I love the legacy of Columbia and their library of films.”

At the archives, Rothman is especially pleased to see the original proton pack from the first Ghostbusters film, a franchise he successfully revived. There’s also paraphernalia from the first Jumanji movie, another series rebooted during Rothman’s tenure. Other wins include continuing the juggernaut Bad Boys franchise.

Any major studio is always on the hunt for IP. As such, parent company Sony Pictures Entertainment, led by Tony Vinciquerra, and private-equity firm Apollo were among the bidders for Paramount Global. They were in it for the library, period. “That was our goal and that was the only thing we wanted out of the deal. We would have sold or traded or bartered or done something with the rest of the company,” Vinciquerra says. “It just got too complicated for us. Shari [Redstone] decided she didn’t want to break it up.”

Vinciquerra agrees that Sony will probably never have the breadth of IP that Disney does. “But we’re agile and we move more quickly. And from what everyone tells us, we’re the most stable studio in the business right now,” he says.

Columbia is also the only major studio without a general entertainment streaming service, a point of great pride for Rothman and Vinciquerra. (Disclaimer: They do have a lucrative output deal with Netflix.) “That was categorically the right strategic decision, because those businesses have been terrible for most. Except for Netflix, everybody has lost billions with a capital B,” Rothman says. “Our product is more valuable in the global marketplace than it has ever been because it can sell to the highest bidder.” Rothman is also a proponent of keeping a theatrical window of at least 31 or 32 days, the new industry standard, versus going to premium VOD or a streaming service any earlier.

At tour’s end, Rothman is asked whether he’s heartbroken that so much history was lost until Sony came in and hired archivists to scour auction sites and work with other studios (Warner Bros. recently returned several decades-old costumes belonging to Sony films). “Yes,” says Rothman, “but what it does is give us resolve.”

This story first appeared in the July 31 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe .

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