Pages tagged “paramount”

With the year-end assault of prestige movies upon us, three major awards contenders—The Road, Defiance and The Soloist—have taken a more tentative place in the annual grind over concerns about release dates.

In a rare collaborative effort for the major Hollywood studios, word from Reuters is that Disney, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. are close to an agreement worth upward of $1 billion to finance the installation of thousands of digital screens at theaters across North America.

Marvel Studios was once content to have its properties (Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four) creatively slapped around and sold by Hollywood studios, but somewhere between record weekends and the contemporary re-invention of the comic-book movie, the company finally came to its senses. This summer, the surprise smash Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk became the first two films the studio produced on its own, and especially in the case of Iron Man, the only question left afterward was, "Hey, what took you so long?"

For quite a while now, DreamWorks has been due for some change. Its relationship with distributor Paramount had gone from shaky, to rocky, to in dire need of a life raft. Due to this tension, it was no surprise that as its contract with Paramount ended the company looked elsewhere to produce its films. Reliance, a company based mostly out of India, is helping to fund a stand-alone production company for DreamWorks.