Paramount Vantage: Three Years of Highs and Lows

Paramount Vantage we hardly knew you.

From an outsiders point of view, you’d think that winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for 2007’s No Country for Old Men and winning Best Actor and Best Cinematography for There Will Be Blood would be a sign of better things to come, but at the end of the day, it’s not the number of Oscars you win, but the plus and minus on the balance sheet. Vantage sealed its fate way before Guy Stodel came on board and even when Amy Israel was in charge the returns weren’t in the plus. Paramount Pictures might be currently looking to merge and cut expenses, but it was a continual set of major faux-pas that has ultimately lead to the demise of the indie unit.

When they did away with the Paramount Classics label, they got rid of pick-ups with very little returns (French comedies with subtitles hardly worked) and the concensus was, that it would become a mainstay such as Focus Features and Fox Searchlight. Looking back on the three years that the specialty film division was in operation, we would have thought that the production side of operations (added to buying and distributing of its films) would assure a certain quality control, but they could never mount grass root marketing campaigns like their competitors and they failed to recognize the need for sure-fire genre films (e.g. horror). After the fluke success of An Inconvenient Truth, they made the kind of bad decisions that couldn’t be covered up by the Oscar wins (8 Total) and twenty plus Academy award nominations. Here are some the highs and lows over the course of the past three years. 

Babel
The globally set art film heavy on the metaphors and starring Brad Pitt worked especially well because Vantage’s focus wasn’t split among other titles. It helped that Alejandro González Iñárritu is a name that facilitates pre-sales and the mostly positive buzz from Cannes gave it a robust enough image for the Fall movie-going season.  

Black Snake Moan
Belonging to the tricky 10 million to 18 million dollar production range, this joins such efforts as A Mighty Heart and Margot at the Wedding as a film where the potential intended audience was difficult to pre-conceive beforehand. Were the fanboys from Comic-con really going to embrace this NC-17 oddity?

Son of Rambow
At 2007’s Sundance film fest, Paramount Vantage thought they were buying the next Little Miss Sunshine and spent a whopping 7 million to get the rights to this Brit pic. The little gem of a film was worth grabbing but not at that price and unfortunately they had problems securing the rights to include the Rambo footage within the film. The delay cost them. When all was said and done, it made 1.8 million in box office receipts.

Margot at the Wedding
Big names (Nicole Kidman and Jack Black) could not save this picture because they were working with a very narrow demographic to begin with. Kind of hard to make a buck when the most screens you open is 120.

A Mighty Heart
Their heart was in the right place and they even had Angelina Jolie on board, but she is more profitable starlet in films that aren’t message driven and potentially they picked the wrong time to release the picture.

No Country for Old Men
Coen bros. working from a bloody script and using staple, unforgettable characters was a recipe for success from the get-go. Like Babel, this received an advance showing from being include at Cannes. 

The Kite Runner
With way too many offerings to support including Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, this costly film with no recognizable talent had a better chance at going about grabbing hearts without  traffic with their own slate meant that they . The Kite Runner. You can’t throw your support round one film when you’ve got

There Will Be Blood
With an embarrassing year of riches, it helped that I Drink your Milkshake had the support of Miramax. Again, this goes back to memorable characters, Day-Lewis at the top of his game and the support from Paul Thomas Anderson’s cult following.

Defiance and Revolutionary Road
End of year programming sometimes have an adverse affect. You have Bond, Leo & Kate and yet both of these films failed commercially. Was it release patterns and the time of year that killed both film’s potentials? I think so.   

How She Move
A smart Sundance pick-up because it was bought for a dime and already had a core audience built in. An easy 6 million dollar profit.