Summit Entertainment
American film production and distribution company
Summit Entertainment, LLC (formerly the Summit Group, Summit Export Group, Summit Entertainment Group Inc., Summit Entertainment Limited, Summit Films Limited, and Summit Entertainment N.V.) is an American film production and distribution label of Lionsgate Films, owned by Lionsgate Studios and is headquartered in Santa Monica, California. It was founded on July 26, 1991. The studio is best known for Step Up and The Twilight Saga film series.
History
Independent era (1991–2012)
Summit Entertainment was founded in 1991 as the Summit Group by film producers Bernd Eichinger (Constantin Film), Arnon Milchan (Regency Enterprises), and Andrew G. Vajna (Carolco Pictures and Cinergi Pictures) to handle film sales in foreign countries.
Summit officially launched in 1993 by David Garrett, Patrick Wachsberger, and Bob Hayward under the name Summit Entertainment LP as a distribution and sales organization. By 1995 they were producing and co-financing films, and by 1997 they started fully financing films, as well as striking international deals with companies like Mandalay Pictures, Artisan Entertainment, Newmarket Films, Escape Artists and Franchise Pictures.
Among the company's early successes were American Pie, Donnie Brasco, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Memento, Requiem For A Dream, Die Hard With A Vengeance, The Blair Witch Project, and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In 1998, Summit acquired worldwide distribution rights to the entire filmography of Wim Wenders, including the then-upcoming Buena Vista Social Club, from Road Movies Filmproduktion; the deal however excluded The End of Violence, retained by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Ciby 2000.
In 2006, it became an independent film studio with over a billion dollars in financing backed by Merrill Lynch. In 2007, the company signed a deal with Entertainment One to release films internationally.
“Summit Entertainment” enters the record as american film production and distribution company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Summit, Entertainment and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Summit Entertainment” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Summit, Entertainment and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q632323. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1991, 2012, 1993 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “Summit Entertainment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.