At least until the inevitable point where Bob and Harvey Weinstein buy back the name of their previous endeavor (an amalgam of their parents Miriam and Max) which was founded in the late 1970s, but really kicked into high gear after the success of Sex Lies and Videotap, The Piano and Pulp Fiction. Watching ‘indie’ film in the late 1980s and pretty much the bulk of the 1990s, Miramax was always the elephant in the room. The Brothers W. even managed to make the company work (and the skirmishes were legendary, if even one quarter of Peter Biskind‘s book is accurate) for more than decade under Disney. Many Oscar winning films and cult favourites were sent into the multiplex under that familiar “M” banner. Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith and Anthony Minghella were three (of many) names to emerge (and stay loyal) to the company. Heck, Miramax somehow sold The Crying Game into a mega-hit. Of course the company was also infamous for cutting, burying, and falsely advertising many a picture (especially Asian films which they had a very strange relationship indeed!) After the boisterous Moguls left their own creation as a subsidiary of huge corporation, things were pretty quiet in terms of headlines, but they kept distributing notably good cinema: Their last notable pictures (in my book) were No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Adventureland, Blindness, Doubt and Happy-Go-Lucky. Not a bad way to go out, really.

Recently, everyone at the company was been sacked, and the doors are shuttered. I imagine the name and the company will linger on for some time in memories of cinephiles who became cinephiles in part from Miramax pushing the arthouse into the mainstream for a spell.

Wikipedia Entry of All of the Miramax Films.