The Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group is a collection of affiliated motion picture studios, all subsidiaries of The Walt Disney Company.It includes:
Walt Disney Pictures
Touchstone Pictures
Hollywood Pictures
Miramax Films
Pixar Animation Studios
The name Buena Vista comes from the much older company Buena Vista Distribution, a company founded by Walt Disney as a subsidiary to distribute his films in 1955. That name in turn came from the street name South Buena Vista Street in Burbank where the Walt Disney Studios complex was, and still exists today.
The most recent President of the Group was Nina Jacobson, who reported to Dick Cook, Chairman of the Walt Disney Studios. Cook, in turn, reports to Robert (Bob) Iger, President/CEO of The Walt Disney Company. Jacobson was fired by Cook in July of 2006, and replaced by Oren Aviv, the marketing chief of the studio.
In 2003, Walt Disney Pictures made headlines as they made their first ever PG-13 certificate film, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, a movie based on a Disneyland attraction. Although Miramax, Touchstone, and other Disney-owned studios have made films with certificates as high as R, Walt Disney Pictures has always remained family-oriented, although Pirates of the Caribbean is fairly mild.
While Disney has owned Miramax since the mid-1990s, until 2005 it was run separately from the rest of the Disney companies by Miramax's founders, Bob and Harvey Weinstein. When the Weinstein brothers left Disney in 2005 to form the Weinstein Company, Miramax was merged with the Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group.