I guess one of the downsides of being a small, starting-up outfit is that when your product has the name of a bigger group attached to it, people will remember the bigger name.
That's exactly the case with Marvel Studios, which is enjoying an enormous amount of success with their inaugural offering, Iron Man, the first of several films Paramount Pictures is releasing pursuant to a distributorship agreement with Marvel for several of their self-made films. Marvel is the big winner here, having made a movie entirely on their own terms, creatively speaking, and now laughing all the way to the bank because of it. After all, they only have to pay a relatively nominal fee to Paramount for its help in marketing and releasing the film, as opposed to the lion's share they previously had to give up to studios like Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox. This bodes extremely well for future self-made movies, like Captain America (which Paramount may help finance) and the strongly hinted Avengers movie.
What irks me a little, though, is how in some of the mainstream and internet press, Iron Man is apparently being billed as a Paramount picture. Not just a Paramount release, mind you, although some media outlets have it right. No, some writers seem content to just chuck the Marvel brand aside and assume that Paramount came up with this picture with a little help from Marvel, much like Sony did the Spider-Man movies or Fox did the X-Men ones. For example, the very industrious (and credible) box office tabulator Gitesh Pandya of boxofficeguru.com, on the eve of the release of inevitable box-office juggernaut Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull is hailing the possibility that Paramount may be the first studio to "generate" two movies that grossed over $300 million dollars in a year two years in a row.
Now, I understand that for purposes of tabulating box-office results here it makes sense to just group movies according to their distributors, but this annoys me for a very specific reason and it's not just because Marvel deserves full credit (which they do) for having made, not released, the best comic book movie ever to the complete exclusion of Paramount Pictures.
This annoys me because quite frankly, Paramount deserves little to no credit for actually making the movies that propelled it to the top of the charts last year as the studio with the biggest box-office, and even less credit for what is currently the highest grossing movie of 2008 (at $223 million and counting).
Sometime in 2005 or 2006, Paramount bought Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks studios, and essentially inherited all of the movies that were in the pipeline at the time, including eventual box-office smashes like Transformers, Shrek 3, Blades of Glory, and A Bee Movie, or all four of the movies they released in 2007 that grossed over $100 million. What did they do in-house that year? Anyone remember Mark Wahlberg's Shooter? No, I didn't think so.
Before 2007 they had turkeys like Mission Impossible 3 and War of the Worlds (which was co-produced by Dreamworks). If anything, it's an article about War of the Worlds that even prompted this rather indulgent post.
Back in 2005, WoTW essentially opened to a $100 million weekend over the Fourth of July Holiday frame, nearly $80 million shy of the benchmark that had been set the previous year by Spider-Man 2. When asked how he felt about their biggest tentpole movie for that year basically falling far short of the record, some suit at Paramount basically said "this isn't just some comic book property, it's a beloved classic" or some really insufferable bullshit like that and went on to suggest that WoTW would have the legs to outgross SM2...which it didn't.
And NOW, after essentially basking in the success of properties they bought from Spielberg rather than making their own movies (the vast majority of which have tanked since the year 2000, when Tom Cruise was still able to sell Mission Impossible: 2), Paramount are receiving credit for the success of..."some comic book property?!?"
Hey, Pandya and all you other misinformed writers there who will probably call Iron Man and Indy Paramount's "one-two punch" of 2008 along with some other movies inherited from Dreamworks like Kung Fu Panda, please get it right: Paramount did not "generate" Iron Man (and arguably not even Indy, which is a Lucas property in the same way that the Star Wars movies are), they simply distributed it. They deserve no more credit for Marvel's inaugural smash hit than Newmarket Films did for The Passion of the Christ. THAT'S a comparison that should make sense to you.
I know Marvel are rolling in the dough right now and need about as much sympathy as a winner of the grand jackpot in the lotto, but the irony here hit me so hard I couldn't help but put in my two cents' worth.
Seriously, Paramount Pictures is enjoying a lot of time in the spotlight these days on the strength of films they either just bought lock, stock and barrel (like all their Dreamworks stuff) or are just distributing. Their formula for success or regaining their long lost box-office glory seems to be to just buy someone else's studio or distribute someone else's movies. When they start ponying up money and/or actual input for movies again, like they did for James Cameron's Titanic many years ago and like they will reputedly do again for Captain America sometime down the line, then maybe they'll deserve all the praise people are now heaping on them for coming up with box-office success.
(Of course, I wouldn't want them to start fucking up Marvel's movies like Sony and Fox did, but a big, fat boost in the production budgets of the movies would be nice...)
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