Paramount Goes Jenny Craig

By Steven Zeitchik

The big studio news comes today from lots over Melrose way, where the first of what could be several slimdowns at studios hit. As THR's Jay Fernandez reports, Paramount is moving to twenty pics a year, with the flagship cutting down to a simple dozen (the other eight will be a mix of Vantage, DreamWorks Animation and Marvel).

The putative reason -- or at least the garb in which this comes -- is the Par-DreamWorks shuffle; indeed, the stories today centered on the fate of DreamWorks projects apres divorce. (As far as a post-divorce structure goes, the headline is that Adam Goodman stays to steer DreamWorks projects, while Brad Weston will continue to oversee Par titles.)

But with congloms scrutinizing bottom lines more assiduously than ever, financial factors are also strongly at play. "We have right-sized our overhead, and we have established a slate volume that balances our financial goals with our creative objective," topper Brad Grey said.

All told, the slimdowns will save the company about $50 million ($60m if you include Vantage from earlier in the year). That's not a small number for the many projects and staffers who fall under its definition. For a conglom like Viacom, though, one wonders what the effects will be. The studio, after all, reps just a low double-digit percentage of the conglom's annual revenue, which is measured in the billions.

The New York Times famously said of the financial bailout a few weeks ago that it looked like a pebble tossed into a churning sea. How many Wall Street ripples these Par moves create remain to be seen.