The Ladd Company

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

Prior to the company's formation, Ladd was President of 20th Century Fox, and Kanter & Wigan also served as Fox executives. As the alleged results of quarreling between Ladd and the studio higher-ups, the trio announced their intents to leave Fox when their contracts expired in December 1980 and form a production company to be financed by Warner Bros. 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., it distributed Chariots of Fire, which won the 1981 Academy Award for Best Picture, and produced the space epic The Right Stuff, the space western Outland, Ridley Scott's sci-fi film Blade Runner, neo-noir film Body Heat and the first two Police Academy movies, amongst others.

Even with the phenomenal success of Police Academy, the good business couldn't outweigh the bad, as 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) sent the company towards oblivion. 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, it produced the Best Picture Oscar winner Braveheart, and A Very Brady Sequel.

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