9 pieces
Event Horizon lost money in 1997 and has been defended ever since, usually for the wrong reasons. The film that survived is a haunted house with a gravity drive for a cellar.
A $4 million picture grossed about $22.5 million, and Paramount still spent the spring of 1979 pulling its own advertising. The Warriors is a case study in a studio mistaking its audience for the film.
Edgar Wright's Stephen King adaptation took $69 million worldwide on a $110 million budget. The film was fine. The price tag assumed a star Paramount had never actually tested.
Tim Fehlbaum's procedural about the ABC Sports team covering the 1972 Munich hostage crisis narrows its field of vision to a single control room. The narrowing is the film's argument, and it holds.
Skydance Media's $8 billion merger with Paramount Global closed this week, ending a year of corporate drama and beginning a larger one.
Michael Sarnoski's Quiet Place prequel is a studio horror release built to break the franchise's scale rules, and the smaller it stays, the better it works.
Ridley Scott made Gladiator II twenty-four years after the original and repeated most of the first film's beats without any of its conviction. The problem is not age. The problem is a director who no longer believes the genre.
Michael Gracey's Robbie Williams biopic cast its subject as a CGI chimpanzee and posted one of the worst wide-opening results of the year. The film is still better than its box office.
Parker Finn's follow-up to his 2022 hit arrived through Paramount in October. It takes the original's thin premise and pushes it into something stranger, harder, and more formally specific.