Viacom CEO Bob Bakish spoke to the gathered press and investors at Deutsche Bank’s 26th annual Media, Telecom & Business Services Conference to explain Paramount Pictures‘ new financial strategy which will go forward from 2019, among other things.
“Our new strategy is not one-size-fits-all,” he said. “So we don’t want to take financing on any of the branded films because they are low-risk. … We’d much rather have partners on higher-budget films.”
Hasbro, Skydance and several other companies will act as partners for Paramount Pictures in the coming years, contributing more to their respective project than they used to do. Which means, if a Transformers movie gets made, Hasbro will chip in more and therefore will have more say in the final product (which can be a good or a bad thing depending on the way you look at it). The budget of the film may depend on Hasbro’s appetite for risk, as corporations would commonly say.
Paramount declared that this new decision came as a direct result of their partnership with HuaHua Media falling through, at the end of last year. The Chinese company originally stayed to fund Transformers movies coming out in 2017, 2018 and 2019 as well as 25% of all Paramount Pictures movies produced in the aforementioned years. Speaking of which, 2017 was not a kind year for Paramount. Almost all of their major movies acquired heavy losses and industry analysts are not happy with their 2018 performance so far. Mr. Bakish is hoping to reverse the tide from 2019 onward.
We wish them the very best.
SilverOptimus
Staff Notice: Sorry, everybody. But we may have to clean this thread. It has gone way off topic.
Shin Densetsu
Hasbro having more input I think is a good thing. While the Transformers movies generally did okay(1st movie especially), I remember the last movies getting more of a mixed reception. When talking to friends who had seen the movies, they normally bring up the 1st movie(s), not much afterwards.
The thing is with the movies, they became more akin to something Michael Bay has his hands on as opposed to something even the casual/general audience would expect/associate with Transformers. This isn't to say Hasbro let Paramount have complete reign over Transformers and Gi Joe with regards to movies before. However going forward, I can see Hasbro reigning them in more.
When the brothers Hassenfeld show up at Joecon and refer to Rise of Cobra by saying "we can do better" and when you have parents staring in dismay as the Transformers are depicted with the typical Michael Bay-isms, I can see this being a longtime coming.
Hasbro wants the movies to sell toys. They don't want a media push that's going to push away parents from the toy aisle.
FWIW I enjoyed the movies I just didn't like the retconning that seemed forced into TLK and how the Unicron issue might not even be resolved in the future.
I am also of the firm belief that success isn't often repeated in sequels, in some ways I'm surprised Transformers made it to 5 movies at this point. Hasbro probably should stop thinking that the success of the 2007 movie can be repeated each time they tried.
Scrapper6
Could someone just lock this already? I feel it's gone completely off topic and has outlived it's usefulness, nobody is even discussing Paramount anymore at this point and quite frankly I'm pretty sure by now site rules says a thread is closed/locked when conversations go this far off tangents.