Columbia Pictures is a film company that had been making films for a very long time. They are well known for publishing/releasing all 190 films of The Three Stooges. After more than 20 years, however, Columbia, let the Stooges go and they had went to other companies to make films.
The Three Stooges[]
The Stooges would receive a tryout with Columbia in the summer of 1934, which allowed them to make three films. The response from audiences and Columbia themselves (most importantly studio President Harry Cohn) would decide whether the Stooges were worthy of a longer and more lucrative deal. However, with Cohn already impressed by their first two of the three films, Punch Drunks in particular, he immediately signed the Stooges to a seven year deal with yearly options.
The Stooges short-subjects were an immediate hit, and were in such high demand, that Cohn used them as leverage to get his lesser quality B-movies into theaters. The Stooges played an integral part in Columbia’s long-term success as the studios feature-film financing was largely dependent on the success of their Shorts department during the majority of Cohn’s reign.
Through this underhanded tactic, Cohn would pay his short-subject actors wages that were below the standards of Hollywood at that time (although still lucrative) but used their box-offices grosses to help pay for his feature-films and their respective stars.
Most of the Stooges peers within the short-subjects genre used those films as a vehicle to transition into feature-films of their own. However, the Stooges were so profitable, and outgrossing their contemporaries by so much that Cohn restricted them to shorts for their entire tenure with Columbia., which would span from 1934-1957.