Bay Brings Genre Label to Paramount

With "Transformers," director Michael Bay presides over Paramount’s biggest budget franchise. he's ready to become the studio's go-to-guy for low cost films, too.

Paramount Pictures has signed a first look producing deal with Platinum Dunes, the genre division run by Bay, Brad Fuller and Andrew Form.

The troika bring a well-established track record for mobilizing low-cost, high-budget genre films, most of them remakes of horror classics that include “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “Friday the 13th,” “The Amityville Horror” and the recently completed reboot of “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” which stars Jackie Early Haley as the iconic maniac Freddy Krueger. 

“We offer a valuable service to the studio, especially with all this turmoil going on in the business right now, in that we do things cheaply, and we’ve had a lot of success with it,” Bay said. “Through the first two `Transformers’ films, I’ve gotten to know the studio very well, and I’ve got a good rhythm with them. I’m excited about this.”

The pact marks the first term deal given by Adam Goodman since he became president of the Paramount Pictures Film Group.

“What makes us so excited to have Platinum Dunes here at Paramount is how Michael, Brad and Andrew carved out an important niche for themselves over the past few years,” Goodman said. “They have consistently created excitingly commercial movies that have proven to be a formidable force at the box office. We look forward to a long and productive partnership with them.”

What will Bay, Fuller and Form make for Paramount?

They will get underway with “The Butcherhouse Chronicles,” a thriller they actually set at the studio last year, with Stephen Susco (“The Grudge”) scripting a premise the producers call “The Breakfast Club in a haunted house.” Platinum Dunes has also boarded the Paramount project  “Property of the State,” a Howard Franklin-scripted thriller about a young white collar criminal whose attempt to straighten out his life is imperiled by an obsessive and menacing parole officer.
 
Fuller said that while Platinum Dunes has made its bones in genre, the producers want to branch into action and thriller films under the new deal.

“The key is making them at a low budget,” Fuller said.

Bay didn’t have much time to dwell on the low-budget pictures he is going to produce through the new deal, because Paramount and DreamWorks have placed a July 1, 2011 release date on the next “Transformers” installment. Bay just returned from a trip to Rhode Island, where he and his creative cohorts kicked around ideas for story and visual effects.The reality of mounting another large-scale film so soon after the last one sunk in. 

“I found myself tossing and turning, and realized there was a reason I originally wanted to push the film until 2012, and do a small movie in between,” Bay said. “This is hard, and I’m getting too old for this pressure.”  Then again, he acknowledged that his recent downtime included the invigorating pursuits of tinkering with the “Transformers” theme park ride, and shooting a Victoria’s Secret spot.

So life isn’t all that bad.