As mentioned back in July, DreamWorks SKG has finally finalized the deal to break free from the Paramount Pictures group and join up with India’s Reliance ADA. “Sources” say that the deal includes Paramount being able to keep their cut of whatever comes out of the DreamWorks pictures that started development prior to just now, without any of the upcoming or future fiscal responsibility. Films in various forms of pre-production that are affected by this deal incude Lincoln, The Trial of the Chicago 7, The 39 Clues, and Tintin.
The reason why I’m so intrigued by this deal is that ever since I learned that the movie studios these days get a lot of their financing from banks and other investment houses, I’ve been wondering how Hollywood is going to come out of our current financial crisis. The only benchmark we had to judge against was that of the Great Depression, where people flocked to the cinemas and theaters in droves, scarfing up gangster movies like Public Enemy, screwball comedies like My Man Godfrey, and musicals like 42nd St.—all genres which gained prominence in this era. Even then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt had this to say:
When the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time during this Depression, it is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of [child actress Shirley Temple] and forget his troubles.
But “in a world” where our equivalent to Shirley Temple is pictures of cats clutching invisible objects and the motion picture industry is competing with TV, cable, and the Internet for peoples’ attention spans, that business model has to be thrown completely out the window. The question is, what kind of model will take its place?