By India McCarty
Paramount wants to fight its way back to the top of the box office, sharing its plans to prioritize blockbusters like TOP GUN 3 and STAR TREK, as well as Oscar-bait HIGH SIDE.
“One of our biggest priorities is restoring Paramount as the No. 1 studio for filmmakers and talent in the world,” Paramount’s new CEO David Ellison shared at a recent media gathering. “Great filmmakers make great movies. For us, we’re going to strategically scale the amount of content for our streaming service as well as studios.”
Paramount co-chair Dana Goldberg said that TOP GUN 3 is “a priority for us,” which is no surprise — TOP GUN: MAVERICK was one of the studio’s highest-earners, breaking box office records around the world upon release.
Director Joseph Kosinski spoke to GQ about the third installment, telling the magazine that he thinks he has “found a way to do it, not only in the scale of what we’re proposing, but the idea itself of the story we’re telling. We’re thinking much bigger.”
“It’s a really existential crisis that Maverick has in this, and it’s much bigger than himself. It actually…I’m trying to describe it without giving anything away,” he laughed. “It’s an existential question that Maverick has to deal with, that would make Maverick feel small, I think, as a movie, compared to what we’re talking about.”
Goldberg said that STAR TREK as a franchise is also “a priority across the company.”
Related: What the Paramount-Skydance Merger Means for You
Paramount already has an untitled STAR TREK project in the works from ANDOR director Toby Haynes, with J.J. Abrams on board to produce. This project will feature brand new characters, but for anyone hoping to see Kirk and Spock, don’t worry — there’s also a project planned with the classic characters on the way.
The studio is also putting major money behind HIGH SIDE, an awards-bait movie reuniting A COMPLETE UNKNOWN’s director James Mangold and actor Timothée Chalamet.
“We’re thrilled to be in business with visionary artists like James and Timothée, and exceptional collaborators like Peter [Chernin] and David [Ready] at Chernin [Entertainment],” Goldberg and co-chair Josh Greenstein said in a statement. “What Jaime [Oliveira, the project’s writer] has created reflects the kind of bold, original storytelling we’re committed to championing at Paramount — and we couldn’t be more excited to hit the ground running with HIGH SIDE.”
Paramount just closed its long-discussed merger with Skydance, and it hopes to use the capital gained in that deal to make movies that will dominate at the box office.
“Paramount has been cash-hampered in recent years, which has caused them to greenlight fewer movies than they might have liked to,” AMC’s Adam Aron said on a recent earnings call. “It appears to us that Skydance is cash-rich, and it would be our expectation that Skydance will be releasing more movies coming out of Paramount than Paramount has been releasing in recent years.”
With exciting franchise projects and new movies from noteworthy directors and actors on the way, Paramount is poised to rule the box office once more.
Read Next: Director Reveals This About TOP GUN 3’s Plot
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