Sony Media Group

Sony Entertainment, Inc. is a global entertainment company established in 2012. It focuses on most of Sony's motion picture, television and music businesses. It is a subsidiary of the Japanese Sony Corporation, managed by Sony's American subsidiary, Sony Corporation of America.

History
On March 30, 2012, Michael Lynton, co-chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), was named as CEO of Sony Corporation of America to oversee all of Sony's global entertainment businesses and Nicole Seligman, Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Sony Corporation, was named as president. On April 9, 2013, Lynton renewed his contract with the company.

On February 18, 2016, Seligman resigned after 15 years working for Sony and remained with the company until the end of March.

On January 13, 2017, Lynton announced that he was stepping down as CEO of Sony Entertainment and chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment to be chairman for Snap Inc. He was later replaced by Anthony Vinciquerra on June 1, 2017 after he was named as chairman/CEO of SPE.

It was reported in December of 2016 by multiple news outlets that Sony was considering restructuring its U.S. operations by merging its TV & film business, Sony Pictures Entertainment, with its gaming business, Sony Interactive Entertainment. According to the reports, such a restructuring would have placed Sony Pictures under Sony Interactive's CEO, Andrew House, though House wouldn't have taken over day-to-day operations of the film studio. According to one report, Sony was set to make a final decision on the possibility of the merger of the TV, film, & gaming businesses by the end of its fiscal year in March of the following year (2017). However, judging by Sony's activity in 2017, the rumored merger never materialized.

On July 17, 2019, Sony announced that they will merge Sony Music Entertainment and Sony/ATV Music Publishing to form the Sony Music Group. The merger was finalized on August 1, 2019.

Motion Pictures
The Sony Motion Picture Group (formerly Sony Pictures Entertainment) is the film production/distribution unit of Sony. With 12.5% box office market share in 2011, the company was ranked third among movie studios. Its group sales in 2010 were US$7.2 billion. The company has produced many notable movie franchises, including Spider-Man, The Karate Kid and Men in Black. It has also produced the popular television game shows Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune.

Sony entered the television and film production market when it acquired Columbia Pictures Entertainment in 1989 for $3.4 billion. Columbia lives on in the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, a division of SPE which in turn owns Columbia Pictures and TriStar Pictures among other film production and distribution companies such as Screen Gems, Sony Pictures Classics, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

For the first several years of its existence, Sony Pictures Entertainment performed poorly, leading many to suspect the company would sell off the division. Sony Pictures Entertainment encountered controversy in the early 2000s. In July 2000, a marketing executive working for Sony Corporation created a fictitious film critic, David Manning, who gave consistently good reviews for releases from Sony subsidiary Columbia Pictures that generally received poor reviews amongst real critics. Sony later pulled the ads, suspended Manning's creator and his supervisor and paid fines to the state of Connecticut and to fans who saw the reviewed films in the US. In 2006 Sony started using ARccOS Protection on some of their film DVDs, but later issued a recall.

In late 2014, Sony Pictures became the target of a hack attack from a clandestine group called Guardians of Peace, weeks before releasing the anti-North Korean comedy film The Interview.