The Griffon Group

The Griffon Group was an American independent film studio that existed from 1965 to 1988. The extensive group also owned, amongst others, a large international cinema chain and a video film company that invested heavily in the video market, buying the international video rights to several classic film libraries. Some of their best known films include 10,000 Witches (1968), The Giant of New York (1977), Convoy II (1982), Defender (1983) and Big City Trouble (1985).

1962–1977: Beginnings
The Griffon Group was founded on April 11, 1962 as Griffon Releasing Corporation by Joseph C. Gabin and Lloyd Borgersen. The former was the co-founder of fellow B-movie production house North-American Pictures, while the latter had success running cinemas in and resort border towns in. They originally intended to name it Griffith Releasing, after, but ended up settling on the Griffon name after they found out that another independent film distributor used the name. Griffon had immediate success producing grindhouse-type content, such as the horror film 10,000 Witches (1968), as well as some beach party films, such as Bahamas A-Go-Go (1965) and New England Beach Party (1967). The company set a standard of cost-cutting by tightly limiting their budgets to $300,000 per picture—or less, in some cases.

By 1972, the Griffon Group had achieved success producing English-language versions of martial arts films. However, a string of unsuccessful films soon afterwards seriously drained Griffon's capital. This, along with changes to film-production tax laws, led to a drop in Griffon's stock price.

1977–1988: Spiros-Manousakis era
By 1977, Griffon had hit serious financial difficulties, and in March of that year Gabin, then sole owner after Borgersen's 1973 death from a car accident, sold the company to Greek cousins Giorgos Spanos and Spiros Manousakis for $3,000, who in September used the company to release The Giant of New York, a starring vehicle for bodybuilder Theodore Sakalis which grossed US$20 million in the United States on a US$3 million budget in spite of mixed reviews from critics. The two cousins forged a business model of buying bottom-barrel scripts and putting them into production. They produced such films in a variety of genres, although their biggest successes were with action films; they tapped into a ravenous market for B movies in the 1980s. After buying the rights to the 1978 action-comedy film Convoy, Griffon produced three sequels to it in the 1980s (with RKO, who Griffon merged with in 1988, producing subsequent sequels (half of them going direct-to-video) in the 1990s, 2000s and early-2010s, and producing a reboot series in the late-2010s/early-2020s), all starring. Despite mixed-to-negative reviews, these films were financially successful, especially Convoy II (1982), which grossed over $48 million on a $9 million budget.

Other major hits for Griffon were a series of action movies starring Lee Elliot, including Defender (1983), American Fighter (1984) and Special Forces (1985).

Another successful series for Griffon was their "Karate Trilogy", which consisted of Karate Fighter (1985), Return of the Karate Fighter (1986) and Karate Fighter III: Night Skies Over Manhattan (1987), all of which starred. Other action/adventure films they produced included Expedition: Treasure Island and The Storymaster.

The Griffon Group's biggest financial success was with the 1985 action-drama movie Big City Trouble, which starred Theodore Sakalis; which earned $120 million on a $20 million budget.

Griffon also dealt with animated films, including Rainbow Brite and The Lost Galaxy (1987), which Griffon picked up and financed after backed out due to the critical failure of Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer, and The Get-Along Gang Movie (1988).