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Founded by Francis Ford Coppola in 1969.1
Initially located in a warehouse at 827 Folsom Street on the second floor of The Automatt building, the company's headquarters have, since 1972, been in the historic Sentinel Building, at 916 Kearny Street in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood.
Coppola named the studio after a zoetrope he was given in the late 1960s by the filmmaker and collector of early film devices, Mogens Skot-Hansen. "Zoetrope" is also the name by which Coppola's quarterly fiction magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, is often known.
The company was initially based at Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, where he had run until a dispute had emerged in 1970, a year before THX 1138 was released.
In 1972, Coppola partnered with Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin to set up The Directors Company at Paramount Pictures, which was affiliated with Zoetrope, and The Conversation was one of the films that came out of the deal. When the effort failed, the company bought out an interest in New York-based film distributor Cinema 5. He later started a new company Coppola-Cinema 7 in 1975, after talks with Cinema 7 failed and set up with a major distributor.
In 1980, the company bought General Service Studios in Hollywood, California, and became Zoetrope Studios, to produce and distribute films, as did later DreamWorks studio.
Zoetrope as a whole faced bankruptcy between 1983 and 1992 after losing money on One from the Heart, and shut down its production studio in Hollywood and returned to being a production company in San Francisco, initially retaining the Zoetrope Studios name, the studio readopting the American Zoetrope name in 1991 with a first-look deal at Columbia Pictures, and Bram Stoker's Dracula became the first film to come out of the pact. Coppola had sold the studio in 1984 to The Singer Family and rechristened as Hollywood Center Studios.
The studio also provided funding for Commercial Pictures, a studio formed by Roman Coppola and Sofia Coppola in 1988, who had produced low-budget feature films, most notably Clownhouse and The Spirit of '76. In the mid-1990s, the company entered into TV movies and miniseries, signing a contract with RHI Entertainment to produce material. In 1997, the company signed a deal with PolyGram Television to finance television projects.
In 1999, it signed a deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) for a first-look financing and production agreement. In 2000, it signed a ten-year financing pact with VCL Film + Medien to handle foreign sales of their own titles.
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By 2007, ownership of American Zoetrope had been passed to Coppola's son and daughter, directors Roman Coppola and Sofia Coppola.
In 2010, Lionsgate announced a deal to distribute American Zoetrope films, including classics like The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, in North America on DVD, Blu-ray, electronic-sell-through, VOD as well as broadcast distribution rights. The only movies from the Coppola canon that will not be released as part of the pact are The Godfather trilogy, which is owned by Paramount.
Zoetrope.com, the Coppola family's website, was created around 1996 and became an online community for writers. In 2016, Francis Ford Coppola announced its relaunch as a "virtual studio".
In 2024, American Zoetrope earned its first Tony Award for Best Musical as one of the producers of the 2023 stage musical adaptation of The Outsiders.
From Wikipedia’s article on American Zoetrope, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4