You’ve seen Citizen Kane… now Citizen Hearst is about to hit cinema screens.

The full-length documentary launches on March 11, but not without a red-carpet premiere at historic Californian mansion Hearst Castle first.

The film – announced by Leslie Iwerks Productions and Hearst Corporation, in conjunction with D&E Entertainment – starts its run in a variety of cities around the US, including New York and Los Angeles.

The premiere is on March 8 and the film will be shown on the closing night film of the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival on March 10.

Director and Oscar nominee Iwerks has fellow nominee William Macy narrating the 125-year history of the Hearst media empire, “from William Randolph Hearst’s pioneering and controversial days of headline-grabbing newspapers and yellow journalism to today’s successful and culture-shaping news, magazine, television and digital brands around the world”.

A world premiere was held at the Hamptons festival last October.

W.R. Hearst – for whom “sublety was not a byword” – was dramatised in the 1941 film Citizen Kane. Citizen Hearst, produced by Iwerks and Jane Kelly Kosek, looks in-depth at how the company has navigated the changing times over the span of two centuries.

Interviews and historical footage cover Hearst executives and editors, including chief executive Frank Bennack, Oprah Winfrey, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Dan Rather, Heidi Klum, Nina Garcia, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and several of WR’s descendants.

It chronicles the rise of American journalism, rivalry with Joseph Pulitzer, and includes glimpses of personal lives of WR and Marion Davies.

Bennack says Hearst is clearly “a very different company than 125 years ago”, but in one sense has not changed at all: “Our mission is still to inform, entertain and inspire,” he says.

See the trailer: