Studio Series

Annual Reviews of each studio’s current and upcoming slates, as well as box office analysis and comparisons.

atomic blondeIt’s tough to have one’s cake and eat it, too, but Focus is certainly trying. If you doubt it, look at the success of 2016 and, though the first seven months of 2017 have been the company’s worst since 2010, the list of upcoming releases is as impressive as anyone’s. In the 15 years since its creation, Focus it is responsible for some of the very best examples of what independent film is and can be.

Open Road ExcerptWhat’s interesting about Open Road’s history is how much of an outlier a film like Spotlight was, and whether or not anything like it will come from them again anytime soon. Regardless, what is very evident is that the soft grosses of the last couple years can’t persist for too much longer, or else we could see Open Road fall to the second division of indie distributors.

Sony ExcerptSimilar to Paramount, Sony hasn’t had the easiest go of things lately and they need to find something major to turn the ship around. Spider-Man: Homecoming will be a good-sized win for the studio but while their film division — made up of Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures, and Screen Gems — isn’t going anywhere, it needs to become a more productive part of the company.

Warner bros ExcerptThere was a time, not so long ago, when Warner Bros. was the model studio in town. They had great filmmakers making excellent movies that earned a lot of money and set box office records and produced some of the most beloved films and television shows ever created. Oh, how the people toiling under the iconic water tower long for those halcyon days of yore.

fox searchlight excerpt

Winning a Best Picture trophy doesn’t happen very often. Even rarer is winning two in a row, and yet that’s what Fox Searchlight just did in 2014 and 2015 with 12 Years a Slave and Birdman. Consider, also, that the company has either released a Best Picture nominee or a film that won another major Oscar each year since 2006, and in several years, it has done both. That’s a nice run, but it might very well end in 2016.

force awakens excerpt

Disney is primed to obliterate every record out there (it already beat the one for fastest to $1B, which it did in just 128 days), and even with a change in leadership in the offing, there are plenty of reasons to think that upward trend will continue apace for some time. This is part two of our weekly series analyzing the current state of the studios.