CBS Airings Of ‘Indiana Jones’ And ‘Titanic’ Hurts Paramount And Helps Disney

Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are glorified advertisements for Disney’s eventual Indiana Jones 5, while even James Cameron’s Titanic builds interest in Avatar 2.

It makes sense, amid a current lock down and related production stoppage, that network television would revert back to tried-and-true options to provide content. So, yes, in an “everything old is new again” scenario, CBS
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got plenty of buzz and coverage over the announcement that they’d be essentially bringing back “CBS Sunday night at the Movies” as a five-week summertime event. Since CBS is owned by Viacom, which also owns Paramount, all five movies are Paramount pictures. What’s interesting is the choice of movies being offered. Three of the title operate as quasi-advertisements for upcoming Disney flicks, which shows how the IP framework has changed and the challenges of non-Disney studios finding appropriate family-friendly blockbusters. It’s not like Paramount was going to air Fatal Attraction or The Godfather.

Forrest Gump (May 10) is not a franchise and Mission: Impossible (May 17) is safely within the Paramount IP vault. Yet, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (May 3) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are part of the Indiana Jones franchise, which now technically belongs to Walt Disney, with an alleged fifth Indiana Jones movie arriving in theaters in 2022. While James Cameron’s Titanic (May 24), while obviously not a franchise title, works as defacto marketing for Disney’s eventual Avatar 2, which is still slated for December 2021. You can joke all you want about how audiences don’t care about Avatar 2, but every time someone rediscovers Cameron’s prior blockbuster classics, that just builds a little more excitement for that return trip to Pandora.

Yes, there is a cruel irony to this, where Paramount reminding folks of classic (and somewhat family-friendly) studio blockbusters still ends up helping their rival. Disney vaulted to the top of the current pop culture mountain partially by approximating Paramount’s blockbuster templates. Iron Man, which launched the MCU back when Marvel movies were mostly released by Paramount, is basically a superhero movie done in the style of a Michael Bay Transformers movie (sleek, shiny, apolitically political, fashioned to make a nerd property cool for the jocks while everyone is mean to each other). Transformers arguably pioneered the modern “kids movies for adults” template that now rules Hollywood. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was essentially a prototypical Paramount-style action thriller within a costumed superhero narrative, essentially Clear and Present Danger in tights.

In terms of blockbuster movies that could mostly be watched by the whole family, Paramount’s library is limited. They aren’t Disney, in terms of having decades upon decades of family-friendly movies to offer as generational touchstones (plus Fox family blockbusters like Independence Day, Night at the Museum and Home Alone). They aren’t Warner Bros., with J.K. Rowling “Wizarding World” flicks alongside Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth movies, plenty of DC Comics flicks (Batman Forever, Wonder Woman, etc.) and legacy family titles like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that would fit the bill. Universal
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could offer the Jurassic movies, the Back to the Future trilogy, some early Steven Spielberg flicks and the Illumination flicks. Conversely, Paramount, like Sony, made most of their fortune and glory in adult-skewing and star-driven blockbusters.

That’s not to say Paramount has nothing else to offer beyond two Oscar-winning epics and the two most family-friendly (and well-liked) Indiana Jones movies. If this were to extent into June, I’d expect to see some combination of the Star Trek movies, the first Transformers, Top Gun, Ghost, Grease, Super 8 and/or Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (arguably less violent than Mission: Impossible II, Rogue Nation and Fallout). The MCU is now part of the Disney empire and the DreamWorks blockbusters (Shrek the Third, Madagascar 3, Kung Fu Panda 2, How to Train Your Dragon, etc.) went from Paramount to Fox to Universal between 2006 and 2019. Even their biggest Steven Spielberg movie, War of the Worlds ($606 million in 2005), is very much not “fun for the whole family.”

This is not a criticism of Paramount, as until recently this is how the industry worked. You had films for adults and star-driven studio programmers, and you had straight-up kids flicks. Sometimes you’d get a PG-rated movie for adults that would score huge with the kids (Columbia’s Ghostbusters and Universal’s Back to the Future come to mind) or vice versa (Star Wars), but there usually was a clear dilatation. On this weekend 30 years ago, you had a prototypical “guy” movie (The Hunt for Red October), a prototypical “chick flick” (Pretty Woman) and the kid-targeted action comedy based on a comic book (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). While there was obvious cross-demographic interest, all three films prospered. Today, or heck back in August of 2014, EVERYONE would just flock to Paramount’s TMNT reboot.

In July of 1997, kids went to see (with or without parents) Disney’s George of the Jungle while adults flocked to Sony’s Air Force One. There were some franchises, like the Batman movies and the Katzenberg-era Disney toons, which brought everyone on board, and that’s why they were considered true “four-quadrant” blockbuster tentpoles. But that wasn’t the all-encompassing goal for every studio picture. It was okay for a big movie to be an R-rated romantic dramedy like Jerry Maguire or a just-for-kids PG-rated fantasy like Space Jam. But now, when adults barely see grown-up movies in theaters and now seem to demand that the kid-targeted franchises be aimed at them as well, the studios with a history of adult-skewing, star-driven blockbusters are at a severe disadvantage in an era of IP-specific franchises.

CBS will be running five of Paramount’s bigger non-Marvel, non-DreamWorks (and non-Biblical) family-friendly (or at least PG-13 “safe”) blockbusters in May. While the first five titles are absolutely representative of Paramount’s former glories in the realm of “kids can see this too” PG-13 epics and PG-rated actioners, they are also representative of how many of Paramount’s prized franchises are now in the hands of other studios. So, yes, a highly-rated showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark is now a glorified commercial for Disney’s Indiana Jones 5, and an airing of Titanic creates excitement and interest in 20th Century’s Avatar 2. At least Mission: Impossible will remind folks that Top Gun: Maverick is arriving this Christmas. Yes, I’d expect to see a new commercial for that sequel on the evening of May 17.