Paramount+ Plans Major Movie Rollout for Next Year
ViacomCBS is moving ahead with plans to make Paramount+ a hub for movies, CEO Bob Bakish announced [...]
ViacomCBS is moving ahead with plans to make Paramount+ a hub for movies, CEO Bob Bakish announced on Thursday's first-quarter earnings conference call. Kicking off the "Mountain of Movies" imperative on the release list is Paramount Pictures' sci-fi thriller Infinite, starring Mark Wahlberg and Chiwetel Ejiofor and directed by Antoine Fuqua, scheduled to be released directly onto the streaming service in late June.
Bypassing a theatrical release due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bakish teased Infinite would "create a lot of noise," calling it a "fun film" in which Wahlberg shines as the star. While not all of Paramount+'s movie offerings would skip the theatrical release, there will be a significant increase this summer in the films that are available on the streamer, which debuted earlier this year. "Turning to movies where we are poised to dramatically enhance the scale of our offering," Bakish said, as per The Hollywood Reporter. "In fact, we will shortly kick off a Mountain of Movies'marketing campaign, where we will highlight the thousands of new movies we are adding to Paramount+, including blockbuster hits and exclusive originals."
In early June, Bakish announced 1,000 movies will be added to the streamer, with additional titles such as The Avengers and Skyfall being brought in throughout July to raise the total to more than 2,500. Plenty of Paramount films will join them, including Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Rocketman, Sonic the Hedgehog and more.
For those movies that do head to theaters, such as John Krasinki's A Quiet Place Part II, Paramount+ subscribers will be able to watch the film at home just 45 days after it opens in the theaters over Memorial Day weekend. A feature-length Paw Patrol movie is also in the works, as are new original movies like Paranormal Activity, and The In Between that will premiere on Paramount+ by the end of 2021. Next year, Paramount is working on upping the original film offerings, with Bakish saying they "expect to begin averaging an original movie a week in 2022," an imperative which will have further details released in the upcoming months. You can subscribe to Paramount+ here. Disclosure: PopCulture is owned by ViacomCBS Streaming, a division of ViacomCBS.