With a surprising run of hits since April, Universal has moved to third in U.S. market share of box-office receipts this year after, as one insider called it, "a really bad run" in 2009 and ranking sixth of the eight largest U.S. studios for 2010.
A committed management team is responsible for these recent hit movies and several projects in the Universal pipeline that are being closely watched by Hollywood insiders as potential heavy hitters - among them, an animated version of the Dr. Seuss story The Lorax and Battleship, based on the Hasbro game, both set for release in 2012.
"They have reestablished their prominence as a movie house that can produce broad, crowd-pleasing entertainment," said Craig Detweiler, director of the Center for Entertainment, Media and Culture at Pepperdine University.
"It's a hit-driven business, so it is always impossible to predict. It's always a gamble. And you have to have patience for your bets to pay off."
Comcast, the Philadelphia cable company, acquired the Hollywood movie studio through its megadeal for NBCUniversal, the owner of cable channels and the NBC TV network. When the deal closed in January, many observers assumed that Comcast would not be interested in a sixth-ranked movie studio.
But Comcast said it was devoted to the film business and wooed Hollywood. In early May, Comcast chief executive officer Brian Roberts publicly courted film great Steven Spielberg with a fund-raising dinner in Philadelphia for Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, which records the memories of Holocaust survivors. Roberts has said he hopes he can persuade Spielberg to return to Universal.
A month later, Comcast agreed to pay $1 billion for a 50 percent stake in the Universal theme park in Florida - a business closely tied to films and Spielberg - that it did not already own.
