Word: paramount
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...soaring success of Top Gun is typical of the shrewd marketing methods Mancuso had championed at Paramount even before he took over as chairman. Top Gun was originally scheduled to open in late May, at the same time as Warner's Sylvester Stallone shoot-'em-up Cobra and MGM's horror flick Poltergeist II. Mancuso instead elected to preview the Paramount entry a week early, then expand its showing in the beginning of June. By bracketing the competition, explains Barry London, Paramount's new distribution and marketing chief, "we got the film established in the marketplace." In the same vein...
...time of that nadir, Mancuso had a restocking process well under way. Months earlier, Mancuso's first important moves had been to hire Tanen and lure Producer John Hughes (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club) over to Paramount from Universal. Hughes' first feature for Paramount, Pretty in Pink, was released in February and has subsequently grossed $40 million. Hughes followed that up in June with Ferris Buehler's Day Off, which has since brought in $70 million...
...same canny marketing tactics have helped make "Crocodile" Dundee, the saga of an ingenuous Australian crocodile hunter on the loose in Manhattan, the sleeper film of the year. Serendipity alone explains Paramount's decision to buy rights to the film from its producer and star, Paul Hogan, for less than $4 million. But Mancuso and his executives made the crucial choice to release the Australian film as a full-scale commercial effort in 871 theaters, rather than as an art-house sideline. Paramount also shrewdly capitalized on the sunny charm of Hogan, sending him on a twelve-city tour...
...climbing back to the top, Paramount has made more use than other studios of extra postproduction filming and so-called research screening: assessing the opinions of preview audiences to fine-tune movies for consumer appeal. Early audience reaction persuaded the studio to beef up the love interest in Top Gun and rework completely the ending of Pretty in Pink. In the past, extensive additional film work was regarded as a "stigma," says a former Paramount executive. "But Paramount has done it consistently on almost every movie this year, with the exception of Star Trek...
According to Steven Rosenberg, a senior analyst with Paul Kagan Associates, an investment firm based in Carmel, Calif., the key to any studio's continuing movie dominance is its ability to extract follow-up value from big hits. There, Mancuso and Paramount are acknowledged masters; one Paramount executive calls the studio's Star Trek rights a "family treasure." Mancuso is encouraging Paramount to sign exclusive contracts with proven money winners like Comedian Murphy, and to promote greater in-house production. Says he: "You can't leave the fortunes of the studio to outside forces." Concurs a former Paramount executive...