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UPDATE: Paramount Pictures is now announcing what my sources told me: it's taking its faux indie division Paramount Vantage's marketing,
distribution, and physical production and combining those three into big Paramount. But I'm also assured that Paramount Vantage will still be an ongoing brand that will still be developing and acquiring specialty product with dedicated creative staff. Only now the films will be released by big Paramount. As part of this, the co-president of marketing at Vantage, Megan Colligan, will be joining Paramount Pictures as 
co-president of domestic marketing alongside Josh Greenstein, upped from EVP of marketing at Paramount Pictures. Both will be reporting to Gerry Rich, who's president of worldwide marketing. Insiders tell me that Colligan's colleague, Guy Endore Kaiser, will likely be departing. Paramount later tonight will be officially announcing these management changes. Presumably, the poor peons will suffer consolidation as this reorganization proceeds. Vantage boss Nick Meyer still reports to John Lesher, who now gets to keep an even closer eye on his old stomping ground after his big promotion from Vantage head to president of the Paramount Film group. So will Rob Moore, who was upped the same time as Lesher -- from president of Paramount's worldwide marketing, distribution and home entertainment, to vice chairman of Paramount Pics. Hollywood has already seen Warner Bros shut down its faux indie Warner Independent Pictures. So I gotta ask: in light of today's news, what's the future of the other faux indies -- Miramax at Disney, Focus Features at Universal, Sony Classics at Sony Pictures, and Fox Searchlight at Fox Filmed Entertainment
Here is the official Paramount news release:
Hollywood, CA (June 3, 2008) - Paramount Pictures and Paramount Vantage today announced the consolidation of its marketing, distribution and physical production departments, which will serve both entities. The merged marketing department will be lead by Gerry Rich (President, Worldwide Motion Picture Marketing). Megan Colligan and Josh Greenstein who were promoted to Co-Presidents of Domestic Marketing, will report to Mr. Rich. The consolidated distribution department will be lead by Jim Tharp (President, Domestic Theatrical Distribution) and the combined physical production department will be headed by Georgia Kacandes, Executive Vice President, Physical Production. Mr. Tharp and Mr. Rich will continue to report to Rob Moore, Vice Chairman, Paramount Pictures. Georgia Kacandes will report to Brad Weston, President, Production, Paramount Films.
“The new consolidated structure allows both Paramount and Paramount Vantage to leverage the strengths and resources of a combined talent base, while minimizing redundancies and optimizing efficiencies,” said Rob Moore, Vice Chairman, Paramount Pictures.
“Today’s change is in line with our strategy to restructure the business for the long term,” added John Lesher, President, Paramount Film Group. “It takes into account the dynamic nature of the marketplace and positions Paramount for the future.”
The combined resources of these departments will service Paramount Pictures, Paramount Vantage, DreamWorks Pictures, MTV Films, Nickelodeon Movies, as well as distribution partners Marvel and DreamWorks Animation.
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Only in Hollywood would they spend tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, either buying up indie companies, or starting their own, only to shut them down when their parent company’s own poor business tactics make them untenable.
I said it before when New Line was sinking. The studios have not just become too big, they have become bloated. They control almost all the media outlets for movies, but don’t produce enough content, because there is only so much content one company, no matter how big, can produce.
I say don’t shut these companies down. Spin at least some of them off, with new investment partners, and a less Byzantine business model, with the original parent company owning a minority stake and first dibs on new content made or acquired by these companies for their video/TV/download outlets.
Hollywood is just like the Department of Education, when times get tough they cut the Arts, Music, and if they could figure out a way, they’d even cut the English Department–the none essential stuff–and keep Sports. Hollywood is no different, Art Films? We don’t need no stinking art films, we need films that make money. Which is why every freaking studio in town prefers to repeat themselves, putting out the same movies every year…It’s why Judd Apatow is the flavor of the month. Easy films make money, thinkingfilms don’t. And in the Art vs. Commerce Wars. Freaking commerce wins out every time.
Surely this cannot be a surprise.
Jake Hollywood’s right
I couldn’t get through an Apatow movie even when it was free on cable.
It was boring and stupid — a movie about a bunch of ugly loser guys made for a bunch of ugly loser guys.
No way would I ever pay money to see an Apatow movie.
The problem ain’t too many movies, it’s too many movie EXECUTIVES and not enough movie MAKERS.
Apatow Stinks -
It’s fashionable in LA to poo all over whatever’s successful, especially if the creative types behind that success are cut from a slightly different cloth. I could take what you said, replace “Apatow” with “Tarantino”, and dig up on the intertubes here piles and piles of identical-sounding hate. Same with Diablo Cody, and I have to say haters have been even more vicious about her stripper background than their ancestors were about Tarantino’s video-store education in film.
If you wanted to criticize intelligently, you might to imply that Forgetting Sarah Marshall felt like a Blake Edwards movie. Um, wait. Blake Edwards made some great stuff. That would be a compliment.
Okay, hang on. I’m sure I can find my inner bastard in here somewhere…. Nope. Not here.
Never mind me. Go on with your fashionable ad hominem hating.
First WB brings down New Line Cinema, now Paramount brings down Vantage?
So sad to see indie companies come and go and only to be taken down by companies that can’t produce the content. With indies out of business we will not see another “THERE WILL BE BLOOD” and “NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN” So sad to see this all end.
Also, if WB is reading this PLEASE FIRE TOBY EMMERICH!!!!
“mheister”
Why don’t you post your Fascist rule book of what movies everyone’s supposed to like and we’ll all follow it.
Apatow is an offensive misogynistic cretin, just another Hollywood schmo making big bucks exploiting women. If you’re going to make hateful films, they’d at least better be funny or engaging.
You seem to have nothing better to do than live at this blog and rant and rave and cram your opinion down everyone else’s throat.
It has become a shared joke every time we see your name at this blog which is ALWAYS. Perhaps you are like those Apatow protagonists and the comment hit a personal nerve. You take this all just a little too personally.
Now pop a Prozac and go sanitize Apatow’s Wikipedia entry. Oh, no wait, his people already did that. It’s the Fascist way.
The thing about having an independent film division is to concentrate on small films that can be inexpensively acquired that can consistently make small but dependable profits. You let the division operate like a boutique, and as long as it makes money, you leave it alone. And every once in a while, a Juno comes along which enhances the parent studio’s reputation and brings in big bucks.
Paramount’s distribution system is set up to send out thousands of prints to thousands of theaters. You’re basically killing the indie division because the studio doesn’t want to be bothered sending out 40 prints of a film to art houses. Like New Line, once the current slate of pictures are distributed, the Vantage label will probably only be seen on studio films that turned out to be too artsy for major distribution.
Paramount’s probably doing this because it finally struck gold with Iron Man and Indiana Jones. And it has blockbuster hopefuls Kung-Fu Panda, The Love Guru and the new Star Trek movie waiting in the wings. it doesn’t want to bother with small films and small profits – at least this year.
Apatow is emblematic of exactly what’s wrong with Hollywood.
The only way for these specialty labels to succeed is to have genre product that teens and twentysomethings will actually want to watch to offset the prestige pictures.
Vantage had too many misses and poor decisions. Babel was good, but felt too much like a poor man’s Crash from a year earlier. A Mighty Heart was a piece of shit and without Jolie, it would have been a Lifetime movie made for 1/10th the money in New Mexico that would have made its budget back in ad sales between the Saturday night premiere and the Monday encore. Arctic Tale was an attempt to ride on the March of the Penguins’ coattails 2 years too late. Black Snake Moan should have never been greenlit in the first place after Hustle & Flow underperformed but since they had to take it, they should have cut their losses and made it a DVD premiere instead of believing that people would actually think “I’d like to go down to the theater and be among a group of strangers while watching the film advertised as ‘old black man chains up tiny white teen slut’.”
Even their attempts at more commercial fare has suffered.
They picked up “How She Move” because teen dance films were hot, but with that genre, you NEED a singer/dancer in the movie who can appear in the commercials/trailers and do the 106 & Park/radio station circuit to promote the movie. “You Got Served” had B2K at the height of their brief career and “Stomp the Yard” had Chris Brown, who died in the first five minutes but the teen girls who were drawn in by the commercials didn’t know that. “Step Up” didn’t have a singer, but it did have a soundtrack with hit songs of the summer, the first real intensive MySpace campaign when advertising on that site actually had an impact, and Channing Tatum, who had just been in that Amanda Bynes-pretends-to-be-a-boy movie that had done decently. “How She Move” was about a Jamaican girl in Canada and had NOBODY in it period. There are only a few areas that have a sizable Jamaican population and the dance movies usually do best in the South, where many people are still suprised that there even are black people in Canada.
They wildly overspent on “Son of Rambow” without realizing that there was never going to be any sizable audience for that film.
“The Foot Fist Way” could be a breakout for them, but it seems like it will be a case of too little, too late. They already blew their load as far as national promotion with appearances on Conan O’Brien and the MTV awards and then decided to only open it in 4 theaters when they should have opened it wide, or at least a Borat-style 800 screens. They are talking of a Napoleon Dynamite style slow expansion, but that movie didn’t have to compete with 5 other major comedies during its run 4 years ago.
And what’s so bad about the Apatow movies? When he makes a movie that looks funny (”Knocked Up” and “Superbad”), they deliver, in laughs and revenue. When he doesn’t (”Walk Hard” and “Drillbit Taylor”), they don’t. People who complain that the stars of his movies look like schlubs are the same people who complain that other teen/twentysomething-targeted films only star guys with eight-packs.
Furious – you say “spin off” these divisions…to whom? The money people of the world are the most risk-averse they’ve been in a generation due to all the credit losses (which are just starting–we’re entering a depression, but that tangential…or not). Even ultra-rich guys (i.e. Sidney Kimmel) for whom losing a few million is peanuts have realized it’s no fun to toss money down the toilet on dross like “Lars And The Real Girl”. I think we’ll see all the faux’s folded into the parent studios, with maybe the exception of Searchlight, who’ve found a formula (sit-com-esque feel gooders with “quirk”) that makes money. End result, we’ll be seeing much less “specialized” product.
Diablo Coady can write. There is more truth and heart in 5 minutes of JUNO than in the entire SEX AND THE CITY movie.
To most people a Paramount Vantage movie is still a Paramount movie, A Fox Searchlight picture is still a FOX picture. The independent branch that gets the least amount of attention I feel is Warner Independent Pictures. Aside from THE DEVIL KNOWS YOUR DEAD I can’t immediately think of a recent movie I’ve seen of theirs. Ironic considering the conglomerate it comes from. I guess what I’m sayiing is – make more JUNO’s, less SEX AND THE CITY’S.
I don’t know. I think one could make a fairly decent case that these studio “indie” divisions have been incredibly destructive to true independent filmmaking. What used to be a sector in which filmmakers could experiment with new ideas and talent due to inexpensive, review-driven marketing campaigns and limited expectations from indie distributors and exhibitors, morphed into the same old marketing-budget arms race employed at the upper level. In that environment, films without studio name talent or obvious commercial appeal have been ghettoized into near oblivion.
It’s true, money people burned themselves badly in the mortgage backed securities, and were repeatedly burned in Hollywood, but I don’t believe that the world is heading for a depression. And even if it was, the movie business thrived during the last one, so it can be a good investment in hard times.
But in order for this to happen, Hollywood needs a new business model.
The current business model Hollywood follows can be boiled down to two words: “Screw everybody.” Which has transformed the film business into the shady accountancy business.
During the “indie boom” of the 90s, smaller, leaner, and more efficient companies made films that were smaller in scale, and exposure, but still made money at a time when no one expected any film to profit without Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing up half of LA.
The early companies succeeded because their business model was to make money on the movies they made so they could then go and make more movies. Also, they made movies that segments of the audiences wanted, but weren’t getting from the big studios. They weren’t blockbusters, normally, but they didn’t have to be blockbusters because they were cost efficient.
Then things changed. The big companies started buying up, or driving out the independents. Ironically, since they became merely cogs in big machines, the freshly absorbed companies didn’t need audience goodwill anymore, and films labeled “indie” were no longer what audiences wanted, but weren’t getting from the majors, but what appealed to an increasingly smaller audience of critics and awards groups.
And if a film did make money, that old “screw-everyone” business plan spread to them like a virus, displeasing everyone involved, especially investors.
At the same time, the majors were essentially doing everything they can to bury independent film with over-saturated marketing campaigns and massive theatrical releases unnecessarily sucking up screen time. Sure, the independent movie might even sell out a few select theaters, but no theater will book it if some mega-company is spending kazillions promoting the next George Clooney / Nicole Kidman money-pit.
So after going to all the trouble of assimilating or crushing most of the indie companies, they then drove themselves out of the independent business.
Which leaves them with a problem. The big boys all have too many outlets (theatrical, TV, cable, internet) to sell content, but not enough content to fill them. This is because there is only so much creative content one company can make, no matter how big it is. It needs outside sources, they just don’t want to admit it, because then they’d have to look beyond the quick screw-job and think long term.
Other than Fox Searchlight, seems to me that the best way for a studio specialty division to maintain a separate identity is to operate from NY and away from Hollywood, such as Sony Classics and Miramax.
The problem is independent films are not independent. They become dependent on Hollywood at some point in the production process (development, or funding, or post, or exhibition, whatever) and they get screwed.
The only way indies will ever survive is to become completely independent like Miramax was before it got swallowed by Disney. The studios just throw money at these small guys and they fold like a tent after breakfast.
I agree with DLW who said:
“I think one could make a fairly decent case that these studio “indie” divisions have been incredibly destructive to true independent filmmaking…In that environment, films without studio name talent or obvious commercial appeal have been ghettoized into near oblivion.”
My favorite independent films ever are from the time when indies were truly indies. Films in which I could discover unknown actors whose casting represented the filmmaker’s outsider attitude. I like making studio films but those early independents were the films that made me want to do this work in the first place. These studio divisions were “faux indie” and so was all their product. It’s better for independent film if these studios and the media and the IFP/FIND’s with their totally-non-indie awards shows stop identifying studio films starring big movie stars as “indies”.
First, I just want to say that Miramax is independent from Disney and have been since 2002 or so.
Second, Furious D is completely right to a point. The Day of reckoning is coming for Hollywood and it will be sooner rather than later even without a actors strike. We are just seeing the start of the “entertainment bust” with the downfall of Time Warner. Everybody else will fall due to “screw you” accounting and that will land the likes of Peter Chernin, Anne Sweeney, Jeff Zucker, Sumner Redstone, Rupert Murdoch, and Leslie Moonves in Prison for a long, long time. The fallout will be so great that it will likely cause the cable companies to lose their “power” as well.
After the cleanup, new companies will be formed and we will see the new golden age of entertainment.
FD–mostly agree but I would say the 90’s boom (Miramax) was down to the fact they were simply better at it than anyone had ever been. And, if you don’t think they had a “screw everyone” business model as ruthless as anybody on the planet, whoo, guess what. Maybe with the studio indies folding away someone can come along and be the new Miramax. But I doubt it, it was a one-off, a fluke phenomenon I think. But who the f knows. And off topic but rest assured mortgage-backed losses are the tip of the iceberg.
Zareh, are you Zared Goldfarb, the Allied Entertainment rep for Paramount Vantage in New Mexico/Vegas?
Mikey, just so you and everybody else know, Miramax was under Disney’s control for most of the 1990’s. In 2002, the company was spun-off so that Disney would have extra money lying around. At that time, the company (Disney) was facing a shareholder revolt and possible takeover by Comcast so they had to do something in order fight off that revolt. The thing that remained was a minor working relationship in which Disney would help finance the purchase of Independent feature films, however that relationship ended when Miramax wanted to purchase Michael Moore’s controversial Fahrenheit 9/11 for US distribution, and it is controversial when it wins Cannes and the French people approve of US policy. Disney said, go ahead, but we will not finance any more films including the one you want help in purchasing. Of course, the only reason why it didn’t win an Oscar is because Moore chose the general movie category over Documentary but that is a different story.
Gerry Rich, aka former houseboy. Anyone not a card carrying member of the well known “GM” better watch her back. What comes around goes around…