Millennium Pictures is the new Cannon Films and I love it!

In addition to Sydney G, I want to give big shouts to Millennium Pictures and Nu Image. I’ve slowly noticed over the past few years that their logo has turned up at the start of a fairly wide selection of movies. From direct to video cheapies to movies that play nationwide in cinemas. The other thing I noticed about them is all of their movies that I’ve seen have been kickass throwback action joints. I’ve come to the conclusion that they are this generation’s Cannon Films.


If you don’t know Cannon, please get familiar: CANNON, CANNON

Where Cannon had stars like Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, Michael Dudikoff, and Jean Claude Van Damme, Millennium Pictures has stars like Steven Segal, Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, and... Jean Claude Van Damme.

Like Cannon, Millennium and Nu Image also occasionally try their hands at artier fare. Millennium so far has released King of California with Michael Douglas, Prozac Nation, Home of the Brave, and Righteous Kill (the upcoming film pairing Robert De Niro and Al Pacino). However, Millennium’s stock in trade remains employing classic action stars in direct to video barn burners. A personal favorite of mine is a movie called Replicant. Directed by Hong Kong legend Ringo Lam, it’s about a serial killer, played by Van Damme who gets cloned by the police. Michael Rooker plays the hardnosed detective in charge of educating the child-like replicant and using him to catch the original evil Van Damme. The sight of Jean Claude acting like a particularly stupid child (who happens to be great at martial arts) is worth the price of admission alone.

The Millennium website seems quite out of date. Their coming soon section is all movies that have already come out, and their poster for Rambo 4 is strange and terrible (and the brief plot description bears similarities to the announced Rambo 5). However, Nu Image’s website offers this:

Nu Image is a full service production company and distributor servicing both domestic and international markets. We offer a wide variety of films. A large portion of our library is dedicated to the Action and Thriller genres.

As an emerging studio, we also produce a large portion of the content we offer.

The foundation of our company began in 1986, when Avi Lerner founded the Nu Metro Entertainment Group, the largest entertainment company in South Africa. Nu Metro owned and operated 35 theatre locations with a total of 140 screens. It was later sold.

In 1992, Lerner moved to Los Angeles and founded Nu Image together with Danny Dimbort, Trevor Short and Danny Lerner.

In 1996 Nu Image formed Millennium Films to address the market’s growing need for quality art films and higher budget action features, while Nu Image continued to cater to the lucrative world home video market. Between the two divisions, over 100 films have been produced since 1992.

Nu Image and Millennium Films continue to grow, with the company producing more than 20 pictures annually. Currently, many of our latest films feature top box office stars and find releasing through major motion picture studios.

So keep your Eye on Millennium, they just seem to be getting bigger. They had 16 Blocks with Bruce Willis in 06, Rambo with Stallone this year, the aforementioned Righteous Kill, a new upcoming Conan the Barbarian movie, and the profoundly weird remake/sequel, re-imagining of Bad Lieutenant. Check them out on IMDB.