The $500 Million Scam That Somehow Made Classics

In 1979, two Israeli cousins bought a failing American studio for five hundred thousand dollars. Ten years later, they were producing more movies than any other studio in the world, the company was valued at over a billion dollars, and they owed nearly half a billion dollars in debt. By 1993, Cannon Films, in any meaningful form, was gone. But the business model they invented, selling movies based on a poster before a script existed, pre-selling territories at Cannes, flooding the market with genre films to meet exploding VHS and cable demand, producing volume instead of chasing blockbusters, did not die. It was absorbed, quietly, by the entire entertainment industry over the next three decades. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and every streaming platform that now dominates the way we watch movies operates on a model that Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus invented by accident in a West Hollywood office, thirty years too early. This is the story of Cannon Films, Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone at his most expensive contract ever, Superman Four, Masters of the Universe, and the first streaming service that arrived before broadband existed to deliver it. This is how two men broke eighties Hollywood, and how their broken company taught the entire industry how to work.