Deluxe Entertainment Services Group

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 Fox Film Corporation in Fort Lee, New Jersey.[7]

In 1916, Fox Film Corporation opened its studio in Hollywood[8] at Sunset and Western. The first Deluxe film laboratory on the west coast was built on the south side of the lot (Fernwood and Serrano), and the laboratory was moved to the new Fox studios building on Manhattan's west side in 1919, where it remained for over 40 years. The "business manager" (later president) of the laboratory was Alan E. Freedman, who guided the company into the 1960s.[9]

During the Great Depression, 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.[10][11] Under Freedman's leadership, Deluxe added two more plants in Chicago and Toronto. In January 1934, Fox was granted an option to rebuy DeLuxe before December 31, 1938. 20th Century Fox (the result of the newly finished merger between Fox Film Corporation and Twentieth Century Pictures) 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.[12][13][14]

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.[15]

With the decline of motion picture production on the East Coast, Deluxe closed its New York plant in the 1960s, followed by its plants in Chicago and Toronto. 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 succumbed to the motion picture industry's conversion from film to digital production like all other large film processing plants.

In 2012, Centro became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Deluxe Entertainment Services Group.

In 2014, Deluxe partnered with the Academy Film Archive 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 Academy Film Archive consists of over 7,500 35mm and 16mm film elements of various motion pictures dating back to the early 1960s.[16]

On April 22, 2015, Deluxe and its longtime competitor Technicolor S.A. announced that they had entered into a binding agreement to create a new joint venture known as Deluxe Technicolor Digital Cinema, which will specialize in cinema mastering, distribution and management services.[17]

Having been owned by MacAndrews & Forbes since 2006, Deluxe was acquired by creditors in a debt-for-equity swap in September 2019.[18] The company was acquired by MacAndrews & Forbes from The Rank Organisation, its owner since 1990,[19] for $750 million.[20]

On October 3, 2019, Deluxe filed for bankruptcy, 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.[21][22]

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 did not include Deluxe's creative businesses, such as Company 3 and Method Studios.[23][24]

• Deluxe official website