Carl Laemmle in the context of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923 film)"

Universal City Studios LLC, doing business as Universal Pictures (also known as Universal Studios or simply Universal), is an American film production and distribution company headquartered at the Universal Studios complex in Universal City, California. It serves as the flagship studio of Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, the film studio arm of NBCUniversal, which is a subsidiary of Comcast.

Founded on April 30, 1912 by Carl Laemmle, Mark Dintenfass, Charles O. Baumann, Adam Kessel, Pat Powers, William Swanson, David Horsley, Robert H. Cochrane, and Jules Brulatour, Universal is the oldest surviving film studio in the United States and the fifth oldest globally after Gaumont, Pathé, Titanus and Nordisk Film, and is one of the "Big Five" film studios. Woody Woodpecker, a character created by Walter Lantz, serves as the company's mascot.

The Phantom of the Opera is a 1925 American silent horror film adaptation of Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel of the same name directed by Rupert Julian and starring Lon Chaney in the title role of the deformed Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House, causing murder and mayhem in an attempt to make the woman he loves a star. The film remains most famous for Chaney's ghastly, self-devised make-up, which was kept a studio secret until the film's premiere. The picture also features Mary Philbin, Norman Kerry, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Gibson Gowland, John St. Polis and Snitz Edwards. The last surviving cast member was Carla Laemmle (1909–2014), niece of producer Carl Laemmle, who played a small role as a "prima ballerina" in the film when she was about 15 years old. The first cut of the film was previewed in Los Angeles on January 26, 1925. The film was released on September 6, 1925, premiering at the Astor Theatre in New York. In 1953, the film entered the public domain in the United States because the film's distributor Universal Pictures did not renew its copyright registration in the 28th year after publication.

Pierre Ernest Jules Brulatour (April 7, 1870 – October 26, 1946) was a pioneering executive figure in American silent cinema. Beginning as American distribution representative for Lumiere Brothers raw film stock in 1907, he joined producer Carl Laemmle in forming the Motion Picture Distributing and Sales Company in 1909, effectively weakening the stronghold of the Motion Picture Patents Company, headed by Thomas Edison, a large trust company that was then monopolizing the American film industry through contracts with hand-picked, established studios. By 1911 Brulatour was president of the Sales Company. He was a founder of the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, later known as Universal Pictures.