Word first began to reach The Bits early last week that indie home entertainment distributors working regularly with Paramount—think Imprint, Kino Lorber Studio Classics, Shout! Studios, etc—were suddenly facing a complete freeze on new licensing activity.

Within hours of receiving that news, we began sending out inquiries to sources within the industry and the implications quickly became clear. Studio people themselves simply didn’t respond—for understandable and obvious reasons—but alarm was rapidly spreading virtually everywhere else.

The disruption in home entertainment at Paramount is reportedly so severe that once titles already announced or in the production pipeline arrive in stores, there may be a months-long drought in Paramount Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD disc product, not just from the studio itself but also in terms of deep catalog Paramount titles from all their indie-label licensees. And getting disc production at the studio back up to speed going forward is probably going to require a heavy reliance on outside vendors.

Either way, the situation at the studio isn’t good—very much akin to the disruptions we’ve seen from other major studios that have gone through merger, acquisition, or reorg turmoil, including the Fox sale to Disney, Warner’s seemingly never-ending Zaslav personnel sloughs, and the belt-tightening that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hopefully, the situation at Paramount will stabilize sooner than later, and new Skydance management will see the value of—and continue to support—physical disc media and home entertainment catalog product as aggressively as the previous studio regime has done. But the situation remains fluid, and the simple fact is we just don’t know what the new owners will see as a priority.

Rest assured, we’re continuing to monitor developments and we will share updates here at The Bits as they come in.

Stay tuned…

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