Forbes has posted an article over the weekend that paints a scenario putting a lot of pressure on The Last Knight to be a big success at the box office when it hits theatres in two weeks. The article cites a series of underperforming releases from Paramount going back in to 2016, creating an unfavorable situation for the studio. It notes that The Last Knight is the last "uber-huge" release, as it describes it, for the rest of 2017, and apparently the last major release at all until October, pinning a lot of hopes on the fifth Transformers movie to succeed big. Keep reading for select excerpts and a link to the article.
[Even] if you don't like the franchise, you should hope that it scores big here and/or abroad when it opens. Because after a miserable year or so, Paramount/Viacom Inc. badly needs this big win.
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But thanks to a tragic run of bad luck, whereby a lot of movies both bad and pretty darn good went belly-up or underperformed, it is essentially up to Paramount's biggest franchise to save the day, or at least give them a big enough win to hang in there until the very promising end-of-year slate kicks in. But Transformers: The Last Knight is indeed Paramount's last uber-huge movie of 2017. And after a horrific 2016 and a disappointing 2017, the fighting robots franchise has become the literal definition of a tentpole.
So now, after 18 months of one miss after another, it falls to Optimus Prime and Bumblebee to not just save the world but arguably save the studio. This is not a good place for any film to be in, no matter how much of a guaranteed cash cow it might be. It's also Paramount's last release until October, with the exception of An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power in late July, so if it underperforms around the world it's going to sting for awhile.
The film may or may not be any better than its predecessors. But it now exists as a true tentpole, with the hope that its boffo worldwide success will keep the money coming in at least long enough for new management to try to turn the ship around. They've got a Mission: Impossible movie next year and the animated Amusement Park looks quite good. If you're someone who likes Paramount as a movie studio and as the kind of place that releases movies like Downsizing, Arrival and Fences alongside Star Trek movies and SpongeBob sequels, then it is for the best that Michael Bay's Transformers: The Last Knight does as well as possible in three weeks.
For Paramount to survive, Transformers: The Last Knight must not die.
Read the complete article at Forbes.
