In 1985, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer decided to make it official.

The creative partners were riding high off a pair of unlikely box office hits — “Night Shift,” a raunchy Michael Keaton comedy about morgue employees who launch an escort service, and “Splash,” a surprisingly sweet mermaid love story with a young Tom Hanks — and they wanted to launch a production company. But they couldn’t find the right name for their business.

“We came up with the idea to call it ‘If?’” Grazer says via Zoom from his Los Angeles office. “As in ‘What if?’ What if I met a mermaid? What if I had the worst job in the world and had to work the night shift? And what would I do? I would probably open a prostitution ring.”

But the company’s investors balked. “This was the go-go ’80s,” Howard says. “And we we

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