When many of ARC/AIP's first releases failed to earn a profit, Arkoff quizzed film exhibitors who told him of the value of the teenage market as adults were watching television.

[6]: 126 AIP was the first company to use focus groups,[7] polling American teenagers about what they would like to see and using their responses to determine titles, stars, and story content.

According to Filmink, "AIP ran on basic principles: keep overheads down (i.e. no permanent studio space), keep all costs down, use fading stars (eg Ray Milland) or its own up-and-coming names (eg John Ashley), use cheap directors, go for genre (horror, sci fi, action, peplum), follow the trends, abandon the trends when audience enthusiasm lessens, give audiences something they can’t get from a regular studio picture, build your own franchises.

They were interested in distributing a car chase movie produced by Roger Corman for his Palo Alto Productions, The Fast and the Furious (1955).

ARC got Corman to direct another Western and science fiction double bill Apache Woman (1955) and Day the World Ended (1955).

As television was encroaching on the B movie market, Nicholson and Arkoff felt it would be more profitable to make two low budget films and distribute them together on a double feature.

He had a big hit for the company with the science fiction film It Conquered the World (1956) from a script by Rusoff that was rewritten by Charles B. Griffith.

His films included Rock All Night (1956); Naked Paradise (1957), in which Arkoff had a small role; The Undead; Sorority Girl; The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957); Machine Gun Kelly with Charles Bronson; and Teenage Caveman (1958), with Robert Vaughn.

AIP also distributed films Corman helped finance, such as Night of the Blood Beast, She Gods of Shark Reef and The Brain Eaters (all released in 1958).

The other key producer for AIP was Alex Gordon who mostly made films though his Golden State Productions outfit, usually written by Lou Rusoff.

Cahn also directed the following for Gordon: The She-Creature (released as a double feature with It Conquered the World); Flesh and the Spur, the last Western made by AIP; Shake, Rattle & Rock!, a rock musical with Mike Connors; Runaway Daughters (1956); Voodoo Woman; Dragstrip Girl (1957), with John Ashley; Motorcycle Gang (1957), again with Ashley; Jet Attack and Submarine Seahawk (1958).

He followed it with I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, Blood of Dracula (both also in 1957 as a double feature), How to Make a Monster (1958), The Headless Ghost and Horrors of the Black Museum (both in 1959).

These included The Astounding She-Monster, the documentary Naked Africa, The Screaming Skull (1957), The Cool and the Crazy, Daddy-O, Dragstrip Riot and Tank Battalion (1958).

In the early 1960s, AIP gained kudos by combining Roger Corman, Vincent Price and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe into a series of horror films, with scripts by Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Ray Russell, R. Wright Campbell and Robert Towne.

to Corman and Lou Rusoff, was to take Poe's story "The Fall of the House of Usher", which had both a high name-recognition value and the merit of being in the public domain, and thus royalty-free, and expand it into a feature film.

The sets and special effects were often reused in subsequent movies (for example, the burning roof of the Usher mansion reappears in most of the other films as stock footage), making the series quite cost-effective.

All the films in the series were directed by Roger Corman, and they all starred Price except The Premature Burial, which featured Ray Milland in the lead.

[19] The psychedelic and hippie scenes of the late '60s were also exploited with films like The Trip, also with Fonda, Riot on Sunset Strip, Wild in the Streets, Maryjane, Gas-s-s-s and Psych-Out with Jack Nicholson.

[21] Due to importing completed productions from other foreign countries being cheaper and simpler than producing their own in-house studio films in America, AIP had released many giallo, peplum, Eurospy and Macaroni Combat war films featuring many American stars and Italian stars such as the comedy team of Franco and Ciccio.

Many of these films were edited, rewritten with different (dubbed English) dialogue, usually by Arkoff's nephew Ted Rusoff, and sometimes re-scored by Les Baxter.

AIP also released a pair of Japanese spy thrillers re-dubbed as a comedy co-written by Woody Allen called What's Up Tiger Lily?.

A few years later, AIP backed a British Poe film directed by Gordon Hessler: The Oblong Box (1969) based on the short story of the same name.

[32] In 1972, James H. Nicholson resigned from AIP to set up his own production company working out of 20th Century Fox, called Academy Pictures Corporation; its only two releases were The Legend of Hell House and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry.

According to Filmink "Corman leaving AIP coincided with Nicholson and Arkoff splitting up – they were like two parents who decide to get divorced when their eldest child finally moves out of home.

In a throwback to the old "studio days", the company is credited with making Pam Grier a household name, as the majority of her early '70s films were made under contract to American International.

In the mid- to late 1970s, AIP began to produce more mainstream films, such as Bunny O'Hare, Cooley High, The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday, The Amityville Horror, Love at First Bite, Meteor, Force 10 from Navarone, Shout at the Devil, The Island of Dr. Moreau and C.H.O.M.P.S.

[41] By the late 1970s, filmmaking costs continued to rise, AIP's tactic of moving into bigger budgeted quality pictures was not paying off at the box office, and Arkoff began to think of merging the company.

The American International name is still a registered trademark owned by Amazon MGM Studios's Orion Pictures unit.

The first film from the relaunched AIP was Breaking News in Yuba County, directed by Tate Taylor and starring Allison Janney, which was released on February 12, 2021.

[52][53] On May 26, 2021, it was officially announced that MGM will be acquired by Amazon for $8.45 billion, subject to regulatory approvals and other routine closing conditions; with the studio continuing to operate as a label under the new parent company, which includes AIP and its titles.