quality:corruption, quality:correction
Syndication, television, recession, and conglomerate Hollywood

At the beginning of the 1960s the major studios began to reissue older films for syndication and transformed into mainly producing telefilms and b-movies to supply TV's demand for programming. The industry underwent a severe recession, due in part to big-budget flops, but soon recovered artistically with such films as The Godfather (1972) and Chinatown (1974).

Steven Spielberg 's 1975 Jaws and George Lucas 's Star Wars (1977) became the prototype for the modern blockbuster. Prior to Jaws, most films would initially be released in a few key cities, and would later spread to "secondary markets" across the country based on the response in those markets — a system called "platforming." Jaws was instead immediately released simultaneously across the country, and backed by a $700,000 TV advertising budget — the first time that trailers were released on network television — along with extensive promotional merchandising. The release of films at hundreds of venues became the norm, with hits such as the sequels to Lucas's Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Spielberg's back-to-back successes with Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and the development of home-video and cable television. Meanwhile, the uncontrolled budget of Heaven's Gate (1980), and its limited box-office revenue, led to the sale of United Artists.

From 1990 to 1995, New Hollywood turned into more of a conglomerate Hollywood and quickly dominating the entire global entertainment industry. Today, three of the Golden Age majors (Universal, Paramount and Warner Bros.) along with Sony Pictures (formed by a merger between Columbia and TriStar) continue to exist as major Hollywood studio entities, all of which were taken over by many different companies that were acquired by and merged with larger media conglomerates. Furthermore, to date, the Walt Disney Studios has emerged as a major, resulting in a "Big Six" until its acquisition of 20th Century Fox in early 2019 resulted in a "Big Five" once again. With the exception of Disney, all the other four of today's Big Five major studios (Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal and Warner Bros.) are essentially based on the model not of the classic Big Five (at that time Paramount and Warner Bros. in addition to 20th Century Fox, MGM and RKO), but of the old United Artists: that is, they are primarily backer-distributors (and physical studio leasers) rather than actual production companies.

In 1996, Time Warner acquired the once-independent New Line Cinema via its purchase of Turner Broadcasting System. In 2008, New Line was merged into Warner Bros., where it continues to exist as a subsidiary. Each of today's Big Five controls quasi-independent " arthouse " divisions, such as Paramount Vantage. Miramax Films (which originally was an independent studio) was owned by Disney until 2010. Most also have divisions that focus on genre movies, B movies either literally by virtue of their low budgets, or spiritually—for instance, Sony's Screen Gems. One so-called indie division, Universal's Focus Features, releases arthouse films under that primary brand. Both Focus and Disney's arthouse division, Searchlight Pictures, are large enough to qualify as mini-majors. Two large independent firms also qualify as mini-majors, Lionsgate and the aforementioned MGM (acquired by Amazon in 2022). They stand somewhere between latter-day versions of the old "major-minor"—just like Columbia and Universal were in the 1930s and 1940s, except Lionsgate has about half their market share—and leading Golden Age independent production outfits such as Samuel Goldwyn Inc. and the companies of David O. Selznick.