Selling A Paramount Turnaround
The Variety headline reads, “Paramount films fuel Viacom – (sub-head) Revenues up 21% to $3.9 billion last quarter”
How does one take the trade seriously when they don’t offer the real facts, but the spin as a headline?
The real deal from the Paramount/Viacom press release….
Was Paramount the cause of the increase in overall revenues (not net, which is down)? Philippe Dauman leads with something else – “The advantages of our growing multiple revenue streams were evident in the quarter, as we delivered double-digit growth in both our affiliate and ancillary revenues, led by the top-selling Rock Band music
video game.”
Then, he gets into the movies.
And what are the actual numbers of the movie side?
In terms of box office, the studio had about $863 million in domestic gross box office dollars compared to $536m in the same quarter last year
Good stuff, Dave. Way to work in the Disney stuff on such short notice. I’ve seen some reports analyzing ten years of studio entertainment segments among the majors that are public (TWX, NWS, VIA, and DIS). Granted that the studio segments aren’t necessarily directly comparable due to TV, home video genre, and other stuff. However, on thing is clear from those reports, Disney and News Corp consistently produces much higher maligns than Time Warner and Viacom. Even adjusting for the fact that Disney and News have been on content rolls that can always falter, the bottom line is that those two studios operate leaner and meaner and better.
I don’t follow television numbers much but has Disney Channel completly killed Viacom’s Nikelodien? You would always hear about how kids went insane over Rugrats or Spongebob, and now it appears that Disney has taken over that crowd with Miley and the Jonas Bros.
Perhaps, hcat. I think they are somewhat complimentary and run age-variable programming. But the cable divisions are accounted for separately.
My notation is about TV production, not cable nets or abc.
Pretty sure Case 39 has been delayed for over a year. I think it is left over from the Berman era.
Great breakdown, Dave. Is the 8% distrib standard for all DW projects?
Disney Channel is an F’ing monster right now. Iger’s helped turn that into the perfect form of synergy and the output could be monstrous for the next three years. They need to capitilize on dragging one of the Playhouse Disney shows into a theatrical run to really get rolling.
FOX produces a lot of meh, but the model is hard to argue with. MGM tried it in the 90′s but never had the right talent to produce the in-house properties, Rollerball being the poster child.
hcat, DP has it right.
It is true that the Disney Channel has cut into Nickelodeon’s growth rate although Nick is still growing nicely compared to most media assets and a lot of other cable nets (in a financial sense).
However, when comparing the Studio segments of the major conglomerates, the cable nets are separate. In all cases there is separate cable network segment. Even here is it difficult to compare. For example, Disney Channel carries no advertising and lives on promotional dollars and affiliate fees. And ESPN, which dominates Disney’s cable net segment operates on a different financial model than pretty much every other cable net due to the huge sports rights contracts and the way they are passed thoruhg to distributors (cable and satellite) and ultimatley viewers via affiliate fees.