Movies
Paramount Pictures Signs First-Look Deal with Platinum Dunes
Paramount Pictures has signed a first-look producing deal with Platinum Dunes, the genre division run by Michael Bay, Brad Fuller and Andrew Form with one of the first films planned under the deal to be The Butcherhouse Chronicles, a thriller that is being scripted by Stephen Susco (The Grudge) and is being likened to The Breakfast Club in a haunted house. Formed in 2001, Platinum Dunes has produced eight films, with the latest, a reboot of A Nightmare on Elm Street, in post-production. The hits include The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which cost under $10 million and grossed $80 million domestic, Friday the 13th, which cost under $20 million and grossed more than $65 million domestic, and The Amityville Horror.
While Bay is well established at the studio on the high end with the “Transformers” franchise, Platinum Dunes puts him and his partners in position to be the go-to guys for low-budget fright fare.
“We offer a valuable service to the studio, especially with all this turmoil going on in the business right now, in that we do things cheaply, and we’ve had a lot of success with it,” Bay told Daily Variety. “Through the first two ‘Transformers’ films, I’ve gotten to know the studio very well, and I’ve got a good rhythm with them. I’m excited about this.”
The pact marks the first term deal given by Adam Goodman since he became president of the Paramount Pictures Film Group.
“What makes us so excited to have Platinum Dunes here at Paramount is how Michael, Brad and Andrew carved out an important niche for themselves over the past few years,” Goodman said. “They have consistently created excitingly commercial movies that have proven to be a formidable force at the box office. We look forward to a long and productive partnership with them.”
The Paramount relationship gets under way with “The Butcherhouse Chronicles,” a thriller that is being scripted by Stephen Susco (“The Grudge”) and is being likened to “The Breakfast Club” in a haunted house. The producers have also come aboard the Paramount project “Property of the State,” a Howard Franklin-scripted thriller about a young white-collar criminal whose attempt to straighten out his life is imperiled by an obsessive and menacing parole officer.
Fuller said while Platinum Dunes has made its bones in genre, the producers want to branch into action and thriller films under the new deal.
“The key is making them at a low budget,” Fuller said.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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