The Ladd Company

The Ladd Company was an American film production company founded by Alan Ladd, Jr., Jay Kanter, and Gareth Wigan in 1979.

In 1979, the three founders were executives with 20th Century Fox — Ladd was the president — when they announced their intention to leave the company when their contracts expired in December 1980 and form a new production company to be financed by Warner Bros. (Ladd had reportedly been quarreling with other Fox senior executives.) Fox subsequently cut their contracts short, ending on October 1, 1979. The day after the contracts expired, the trio placed ads for the newly named "Ladd Company" in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety.

Under Warner Bros., The Ladd Company distributed Chariots of Fire, which won the 1981 Academy Award for Best Picture. Among the films it produced were the Space Race epic The Right Stuff, the space western Outland, Ridley Scott's science-fiction film Blade Runner, neo-noir film Body Heat, and the first two Police Academy movies.

Police Academy proved very profitable. But the returns from the company's successes did not outweigh the box-office failures of The Right Stuff, the edited version of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America and the animated Twice Upon a Time (co-produced with Lucasfilm). On April 18, 1984, Alan Ladd, Jr. and Warner Bros. parted ways, even though the former still had three years left on the studio's contract. From that point on, "the Ladd Company [would] become a non-exclusive production organization."

During a brief partnership with Paramount Pictures in the mid-1990s, the company produced the Best Picture Oscar winner Braveheart, and A Very Brady Sequel.

Ladd's later releases are the 2005 Lasse Hallström drama, An Unfinished Life and the 2007 Ben Affleck drama Gone Baby Gone, both distributed by Miramax Films.