The company was established as Golden Princess Amusement Co. Ltd., which originally distributed Western films and ran a circuit of theatres located on the major streets of Hong Kong in the late 1970s, with the backing of Lawrence Louey, a director of Kowloon Development whose family then owned Kowloon Motor Bus.
Having invested in independent film companies like Cinema City, Always Good and Magnum in 1980s, Golden Princess began to distribute Chinese films and, together with Cinema City, became the third power of Hong Kong cinema, competing with Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest for nearly a decade.
It also produced a number of films directed by John Woo before he moved to Hollywood, including The Killer, Bullet in the Head, The 10,000 Bullets, Once a Thief and Hard Boiled.
With the decline of the Hong Kong film market in the mid-1990s, Golden Princess eventually withdrew from the cinema operation, film distribution and production businesses.
Studios announced in 2025, that they had acquired the worldwide rights (outside select Asian countries) for 156 Hong Kong cinema films from the Golden Princess library, with the intention of releasing them on physical media and on their streaming service.