Viacom executives will be in the hot seat next week after jetting to China to help assuage the fears of a major film financing partner, Variety has learned.
Angry over losing tens of millions of dollars on a $1 billion slate-financing deal with Paramount Pictures, Chinese film company Huahua Media is looking for assurances that the studios upcoming movies will be more commercially successful. Viacom is Paramounts corporate parent.
Executives from Viacom will travel to China next week to meet with their counterparts at Huahua and to try to reassure them that things will improve in coming months, a source close to Huahua tells Variety. The Chinese company is particularly disappointed with the reception of Baywatch, Ghost in the Shell, and Transformers: The Last Knight, and believes that Paramounts creative team has not done a good job of making films that will play to international audiences.
We have incurred losses for the first months of the current year, the source said. These are not trivial losses; they are huge losses.
The company was particularly incensed that the most recent Transformers did not perform better in China. The film made nearly $230 million in the Middle Kingdom, but that was a significant drop-off from the $320 million earned by its predecessor, Transformers: Age of Extinction, in 2014. Globally, the film earned $570.6 million a weak result given its $217 million budget.
