TriStar Pictures, Inc. is an American film production company that is part of the Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is part of the Japanese conglomerate Sony Group Corporation. The company was founded on March 2, 1982, as Nova Pictures, a joint venture of Columbia Pictures, CBS, and HBO, whose video units handled video, broadcast, and pay cable rights to its products. It was renamed a year later to Tri-Star to avoid confusion with the PBS series Nova.