Back in the days when the only way to see a movie was to go to a theater, a handful of Hollywood film studios shrewdly bought cinema chains to showcase their latest hits. Last week Japan's Sony put a new twist on this Hollywood strategy by plunging into the movie business as a way of selling its expanding video technology. In the largest-ever Japanese takeover of a U.S. company, the electronics giant (fiscal 1989 sales: $16 billion) snapped up Columbia Pictures Entertainment, agreeing to pay $3.4 billion and assume $1.2 billion in debts. Coming less than two years after Sony's $2...
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