Hollywood Babble On & On #169: Dreamworks Goes Bollywood, Paramount Sulks

It's official, the men behind Dreamworks have won their freedom from Paramount, thanks to Indian media conglomerate Reliance and its $500 million in equity and $700 million in debt. Which tells you a lot about the strength of the fast-growing economy of India, which will be a power to watch in the near future.

Paramount seems a tad ambivalent about losing one of their major sources of films, (you know, the thing Paramount is supposed to produce to make money?) and released this statement: (h/t Nikki Finke)

"We congratulate Steven, David and Stacey, and wish them well as they start their newest venture. Steven is one of the world's great story-tellers and a legend in the motion picture business. It has been an honor working closely with him and the DreamWorks team over the last three years and we expect to continue our successful collaboration with Steven in the future.”

“To facilitate a timely and smooth transition, Paramount has waived certain provisions from the original deal to clear the way for the DreamWorks principals and their employees to join their new company without delay.”

"The acquisition of DreamWorks has been beneficial both creatively and financially for Paramount and accelerated our strategy of focusing on our world-class franchises and brands. It gave us a solid slate of films to fill out our lineup, a valuable catalog we were able to monetize, and a development pipeline that will bear fruit for us for years to come. The acquisition jump-started our rebuilding plans, which are now well underway and include promising upcoming releases such as Star Trek by JJ Abrams, G.I. Joe by Stephen Sommers, Transformers 2 by Michael Bay, David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2, among many others."

While I don't mind Paramount taking a moment to shill what they have coming down the pipeline, the statement really makes no mention about the massive entangled relationship they had with Dreamworks. Ever since the purchase it was often hard to find out where one company started and the other one ended.

Now I'm no legal expert, but I do know how things usually end in Hollywood, and I figure that a lot of lawyers are going to make a lot of money sorting this out. Yet another thing to distract Hollywood from actually making movies.

Oh well, it may not be much, but at least it's a cheap excuse to talk about movies, and a cheaper excuse to post a picture of Bollywood Goddess Aishwarya Rai.