"Paramount plans to target both established filmmakers and newcomers with its micro-budget pitch"

Cool!

What genres do you think will be successful? More horror?

This is like McDonald's selling salads...

A conglomerate looking to muscle in on the one way independents were able to survive - by finding a cheap flick to produce that would hit it big...

Quoted from ajr This is like McDonald's selling salads... A conglomerate looking to muscle in on the one way independents were able to survive - by finding a cheap flick to produce that would hit it big...

Those were my initial thoughts.


One thing that I noticed and was curious about:

Quoted Text Because thousands of theaters are now equipped to show digital movies, the micro-budget productions can be distributed without the added expense of striking film prints, which can cost more than $1,000 apiece.

Does anyone know what the situation in the States is like regarding this?

In the UK, the Film Council started a scheme designed to have numerous digital screens installed in multiplexes. In essence they paid for large corporations to update their screens, in the vague hope that independent filmmakers would be able to show their films.

Many hundreds of millions down the drain later, they gave up on the scheme. The cinemas were just showing the latest 3D pictures on the screens instead.

I very much doubt the situation is different in the US.

Basically, this is the giants deciding to look for inexpensive films to produce, giving them an easy to shoot flick that they can toss into their distribution and marketing network with almost no out of pocket cost. If they get the right script, it's a near-instant profit. And a near-instant profit is what they're desperately seeking to pad their bottom line. Seems like a solid business move to me...not that they couldn't have done this without "creating a new division"...

Quoted from George Willson not that they couldn't have done this without "creating a new division"...

Exactly what was bothering me about it. Why announce it? Why not just agree to accept unsolicited submissions?  By "creating a department" do they mean we're going to add four readers?  Or is it something more?

Seems to me that when you create a division you add expense and payroll, which works at cross purposes to what you're trying to accomplish.