Hollywood has a long history of chasing too much of a good thing. Once a studio has a major hit with a certain kind of movie, every other studio copies the blueprint and starts churning out their own versions. Think disaster movies in the 1970s, or slasher films in the ’80s. Eventually, creativity gives way to formula, viewers grow numb from the repetition and audiences move on, leaving the studios facing a couple of down years as they clear their pipelines of genre pictures nobody wants to see anymore. The cycle then usually starts up all over again.
This summer, domestic audiences seem to have lost their taste for big-budget franchise films and sequels. Ticket sales were down 9 percent from last summer through the July 4th weekend as latest installments of aging franchises fell flat, from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Transformers: The Last Knight to Alien: Covenant and Universal’s The Mummy reboot. New would-be franchises, meanwhile, such as Warner’s King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword and Paramount’s Baywatch, never found open water. Read More »
our industry, a partnership will bring significant benefit to Paramount and Viacom, both strategically and financially, provide new opportunities for Paramount’s employees and talent, and enhance long-term value for all Viacom shareholders.
if the superior skills of a LeBron James or Kobe Bryant added a mere 2 points per game on average to his team’s total, in a league where the average point differential per game is 0.06, over the course of a season they could easily add a half a dozen or more wins to the team’s record, making the difference between first place and missing the playoffs. Given the financial payoff for the team’s owners of reaching the playoffs, James and Bryant are worth almost any price, as in fact their salaries reflect.