The AIP Story (1970-1980)

In the early 1970's, AIP would lose two of its biggest key players. Longtime director/producer Roger Corman who had been with the company since its earliest days as the American Releasing Corporation would end his association with it in 1970 due to dissatisfaction over their handling of his dark comedy "Gas-s-s-s." In 1972, co-founder James H. Nicholson resigned from AIP in order to become an independent producer elsewhere, leaving Samuel Z. Arkoff, a man who had always been more of an exhibitor and "showman" than an executive to be the company's president.

The output at the very beginning of the decade was mostly comprised of the same kinds of horror films (both U.S. made and imported from either the U.K. or Italy) that had been popular for most of the 60's but as audiences' cinematic tastes were changing, AIP's style had to change along with that. Seeing how successful action films with Black heroes were for other studios, AIP jumped on that bandwagon and produced a multitude of films of various genres for Black audiences over the next several years. They even found a new box office star in Pam Grier, a woman whose profitable action thrillers made her the undisputed queen of the "Blaxploitation" genre. When the quick, cheap movies made primarily for drive-ins and for double features began going out of style though, AIP realized they just might have to "go mainstream" in order to stay relevant in the new Hollywood. Many of their releases during the second half of the 70's had larger budgets, better production values and were starring bigger box office names who would have probably never even considered appearing in an AIP film during the 50's or 60's. While some of these movies were quite successful, they still cost more money than AIP was used to spending and the company's debts piled up, making a corporate takeover inevitable. In 1979, negotiations were underway for AIP to merge itself with Filmways Pictures. The merger became official by mid 1980. Ironically enough though, Filmways wouldn't last much longer. It was bought out by Orion Pictures in 1982 and by the end of the 90's, MGM would own the majority of the film and television catalogs of all three companies.

In 2020, after remaining inactive for 40 years, AIP was relaunched by MGM as a subsidiary label (with distribution by United Artists) for smaller, lower budget fare that is far more likely to either get released directly to streaming or have very limited theatrical release. The output for the new AIP has been very sporadic and low key. Since Amazon purchased MGM not long afterward and recently shut down the much larger United Artists, the future of AIP remains uncertain. Even if AIP is essentially "dead" again, its wide variety of "guilty pleasure" films will always live on for generations of cult movie fans.

For this final chapter of the American International Pictures story, all the feature film releases for 1970-1980 that I could find in my references are included here. This includes any film that they either produced and/or distributed themselves or acquired from another country for international release. The small handful of films from the 2020 relaunch are also listed.

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