Paramount‘s New President Jeff Shell might have experimented greatly with windowing at NBCUniversal during the pandemic and post, specifically dabbling in the controversial day-and-date, however, the exec said today at the revived conglom’s afternoon presser that he’s “100%” on board with theatrical.
“That’s what makes a movie, a movie, and we’re all united in that,” he said referring to his co-executives, CEO David Ellison, Motion Picture Co-Chairs Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein, and DTC Chair Cindy Holland who were among the top brass sitting on today’s dais with him.
“I believe in windows, and I think we all believe in windows,” continued Shell.
“Do I believe you can maximize value in windows? Absolutely, and we’re going to be looking at our windows across each thing,” he said.
“I don’t think each movie is created equal. Different movies deserve different windows sometimes. I think we’re pretty united up here in terms theatrical being critical and it has to be part of the equation, but we’re also going to be much more diligent about looking at the value,” said Shell.
As Peacock was coming into existence and the industry was emerging out of Covid, Shell put a downstream waterfall in place at Universal whereby theatrical films went to PVOD depending on their box office performance after 17 to 30 days, followed by an exclusive window on streaming service Peacock, then either a post window on Amazon Prime or Netflix (depending on whether the pic was animated or live-action). The model was a means of making money on a movie in its home entertainment window.
Meantime former Netflix Head of US Scripted TV Cindy Holland exclaimed, “Made-for-streaming movies are not a priority for me.”
Speaking to Deadline separately at lunch, Shell told us that when it comes to all streamers making money and talent receiving back-end, the whole industry is bound to go “back to the future,” meaning each streaming service would ultimately license to the other and not keep their content solely siloed to their service. That was Shell’s prognostication. As he starts his new job at Paramount, he’ll be looking closely at hammering solid pay-one deals for the studio. Currently Paramount Pictures has a shared pay-one that’s exclusive to Paramount+ and Amazon Prime.
In underscoring the new Paramount’s commitment to cinema, CEO David Ellison exclaimed, “The movies we make will be made for theatrical.”
