Who are the big winners and losers of the major studios today?

With Disney absorbing Fox, essentially reducing the number of big studios from 6 to 5, who do you think are the big winners and losers in the modern studio system? I think we are seeing the emergence of giant entertainment companies, with Disney absorbing Fox, Comcast buying Universal and AT&T buying Warner Brothers, these 3 have seriously deep pockets. It seems Sony Pictures and especially Paramount are the weaker studios at this point, it makes wonder if Paramount/Viacom won't be bought out by a bigger company, like Apple or Amazon eventually. They seem to be in the worst straights:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/business/media/paramount-pictures.html#commentsContainer

You also have Lion Gates, I guess, they occasionally have a hit, but they have a lot of misses.

I'd say Paramount is by far the weakest of the big five at the moment. It's the only one that currently has an operating income in the red, it relied on a franchise that nearly burned itself to the ground through mismanagement (Transformers), has had a large number of big flops (Monster Trucks, Ben Hurr), and basically relies on Blumhouse's high profit margin horror movies to not be in a complete death spiral.

Universal is distributing Blumhouse's films.

Oops, I somehow read that wrong. I don't know how I managed that. In that case Paramount has absolutely nothing going for them.

(These are just my opinion only.)

Disney is financially the most successful, but is starting to get into a creative slump. I'm only excited for Frozen II, and I have no interest in any of the current line-up of TV shows.

Paramount has been either crap or bland for the past several years, but Bumblebee is a ray of hope in the darkness.

Sony is in a similar position as to Paramount, but Into the Spider Verse was AMAZING to a much larger degree.

Edited by BrightLight on Apr 21st 2019 at 10:41:37 PM

Do you mean that you are neither interested in the Marvel or Starwars franchises? Because I could relate but I wouldn't worry too much about Disney.

Edited by gropcbf on Apr 21st 2019 at 1:42:59 PM

Thanks for reminding me about Marvel.

I like the Captain America, Iron Man, and Avengers films. Alas, Endgame seems to be the end of the line.

I prefer the George Lucas era of Star Wars (particularly the Prequels), so Disney Star Wars is dead to me — with the exception of the Clone Wars revival.

Disney is fine. Their Life action division could REALLY use some new creative thinkers, but their animated output is currently a mix out of sequels and new idea. I could do with less sequels, but they also did Zootopia, inside Out, Coco aso in the last years. And naturally the Marvel studios always make bank. Add the whole Fox properties and they have gotten a lot of variety. They also own searchlight now, remember.

I would say Universal is currently ranking second, just based on the sheer number of movies they release. Plus, they have the Jurassic Park Franchise, fast and the furious and Jordan Peele. So, a lot of money going around there.

Warner Bros is really close, though, plus they have a number of still pretty popular creators attached to them (above all Nolan).

Sony is struggling but, well, they have recently enjoyed some success and we all know that if everything fails Far from Home will secure their box office this year.

Paramount is certainly at the very bottom of the pecking order. Honestly, the only big franchise they have is Transformers and I am not even sure if there is anything else they own. Other than Titanic that is. But you can hardly turn Titanic into a franchise.

They have Mission Impossible, but yeah, they have very few successful big franchises. Transformers is in decline, Star Trek and TMNT sputtered out as franchises after a few films (they seem to work better on TV anyway). Paramount does seem like the weakest player among the studios.

Disney’s absolutely the winner. All the highest-grossing movies now are franchise films, and Disney holds the most popular large franchises (MCU, Star Wars, Pixar, Disney Animation, and now X-Men, among others). In 2011 they had 12% of the domestic box office; they grew rapidly, and for the last three years they’ve had between 20% and 27%.

The losers are everyone else.

Edited by Galadriel on Apr 22nd 2019 at 3:42:57 PM

They are also pretty good in creating new franchises. A lot of the newer franchises are Disney.

Bumblebee would like to disagree with you about Paramount being in decline.

They're still near rock-bottom, but they have a chance of climbing out of the pit that they've dug themselves in.

I figure that Warner's are hoping that Detective Pikachu really kick starts the age of good video game films.

Until Paramount rolls up with Sonic, I guess.

Didn't Bumblebee underperform?

It was considered a moderate success, but it was the lowest grossing movie in the franchise.

Practically speaking, all that Paramount has is the Hasbro brand, and God knows if people would be invested on Action Man and Stretch Armstrong. They really need to get Transformers, GI Joe, and Power Rangers right if they want to compete with the big boys.

I thought Power Rangers was a pretty fun movie, but was marketed horribly. The whole serious, Darker and Edgier feel of the trailers almost reminded me of a parody, like you'd see if someone made a Youtube skit mocking the idea of an "edgy" Power Rangers reboot.

I am not sure if Power Rangers is really made for the big screen. I mean, it is one thing to watch the show if it just happens to pop up in TV and another to actively seek out what you know will be a collection of overdone plot points.

"Collection of overdone plot points" describes 90 percent of superhero movies. If it's good and marketed well, people don't mind reused ideas.

I don't think that you can compare this. Mostly because Superheroes tend to be very distinct characters with very specific struggles. The Power rangers are a bunch of teens we tend to know next to nothing about other than them being "generic teens" fighting every single time against the same kind of enemy.

Sure, if you intentionally boil it down to a simplistic reading. Because I can then say that most superheroes tend to fit a specific pile of tropes fighting interchangeable, largely unmemorable villains.

It comes down to the execution.

Paramounts' partnership with Hasbro has made them just about dominant in movie toy sales since the first Transformers came out. You factor in all the Star Wars brands like Lego and they might even out (not accounting for everything Disney owns, but I don't think the Marvel merchandise has been unusually strong), but since both The Last Knight and The Last Jedi their sales have been down.

For me the thing about the Power Rangers movie was that it could be a fine supernatural drama with good acting, but when it switched into cheesy action mode there was such a major shift in tone and you can't help but be disappointed 90 percent of the action is the climax. Relatedly I felt the movie dropped the ball when it came to developing the lore, in turn the sets, Ranger costumes and Zords didn't really stand out as distinctive (generic caves, featureless spaceships, nearly identical suit designs). In a Merchandise-Driven goldmine like Power Rangers, you gotta sell the toys at least a little.

I wouldn't say Bumblebee underperformed.

Money-wise, it wasn't a record smasher.

But critic-wise, it's currently got 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. That's on par with the last two How to Train Your Dragon movies (the first one is highly overrated, in my opinion).

As long as they keep the ball rolling with future sequels to Bumblebee, which should be easy as long as they aren't lazy like they were before, Paramount should be able to finally find its groove in today's era of filmmaking.

Edited by BrightLight on Apr 23rd 2019 at 10:48:48 PM

You could say the same thing about Transformers: they're a bunch good alien robots fighting evil alien robots. If you boil everything to their bare premise, nothing sounds too interesting. But, outside the popular versions, both Transforners and Power Rangers have more than 25 years of lore and characters that gives creative minds lots to develop from.

I think they need to look at the Boom! Comics series to get a idea of how to adapt PR in modern times. Heck, they could use Lord Drakkon as the Big Bad from the Phase 1 of the Hasbro Cinematic Universe.

Speaking of franchises, they also have TMNT. There where even talks of potentially doing a crossover with Transformers a while back. Mind you, they have the entire Nickelodeon catalog. Didn't they even announced a plan to do animated and live action movies of some properties? I even remember Korra being brought up, but now Nickelodeon is with Netflix for the live action Avatar series.

We'll have to wait and see if Bumblebee continues the Transformers success, because the sequel has talks of wanting a little more "Bayhem" (Michael Bay action). I am very concerned about this.

So, after a decade of basically everyone saying the Michael Bay movies are terrible, and diminishing returns with every single one, culminating in a $100 million loss, their response to a reboot that was nothing like the Bay movies and was not only profitable but also near-universally acclaimed, is to make the sequel more like the Michael Bay movies. Genius.

This is why nobody likes executives. They're idiots.

Edited by Primis on May 6th 2019 at 8:43:19 AM