At first glance, the new Paramount has a 2026 slate that looks a little bare – only five films slated for release. But studio insiders told TheWrap on Thursday that three other films that are deep in post-production are on course for release in 2026.
The first is “Heart of the Beast,” a survival thriller from “Suicide Squad” director David Ayer starring Brad Pitt as an Army special forces vet who must survive in the Alaskan wilderness with his retired combat dog after a plane crash. Also starring J.K. Simmons and with Damien Chazelle as executive producer, it will mark Pitt’s first film since he set a new career high at the box office with Apple’s “F1.”
The other two films are a pair of horror projects from Paramount’s production deal with 18hz, the company founded by former DC Films chief Walter Hamada after his exit from the superhero label: “Primate,” a film from director Johannes Roberts (“Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City”) and starring “CODA” Oscar winner Troy Kotsur, and an untitled project from André Øvredal, director of “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.”
The films are part of a large to-do list for the company’s incoming feature film chief, Don Granger, who was previously the head of Skydance Features and Sports. With films such a critical part of the company’s growth engine, Granger, who reports to co-chairs Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg, will need to plot a course for the studio’s future that includes a deeper bench of projects.
Those three films join the five that are already on the 2026 slate, which include a revival of the “Scary Movie” series, a seventh “Scream” film, Nickelodeon’s “The Legend of Aang” and “Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie,” and an untitled comedy from “South Park” co-creator Trey Parker with longtime collaborator Matt Stone and “Not Like Us” Grammy winner Kendrick Lamar as producers.
This year, Paramount still has releases like “Roofman” starring Channing Tatum, “The Running Man” starring Glen Powell and a fourth “SpongeBob SquarePants” movie, all of which are scheduled to debut in the fourth quarter.
The franchise front
In today’s Hollywood, franchise management is key above almost anything else. On that front, Skydance inherits a Paramount that at least partially has its tentpole future ironed out. Two of the studio’s most dependable series of the past decade, “Sonic the Hedgehog” and “A Quiet Place,” will have new installments on the way in 2027.
That leaves two franchises that were big parts of Paramount’s box office gross totals in the 2010s: “Star Trek” and “Transformers.” While “Trek” has enjoyed mixed streaming success on Paramount+ with shows like “Strange New Worlds,” it hasn’t been on the big screen since “Star Trek: Beyond” in 2016, and multiple attempts at a fourth installment of the Chris Pine-fronted reboot saga (and a separate film by Quentin Tarantino) started in 2009 have stalled out.
“Star Trek is the immediate priority as far as tentpole films are concerned,” one top talent agent told TheWrap. With “Strange New Worlds” set to run for two more seasons and upcoming “Trek” show “Starfleet Academy” set to at least run for two seasons, it remains to be seen whether any plans for a return to theaters for “Trek” will also involve a fresh start for its TV side.
On the “Transformers” side, people with knowledge of the Hasbro franchise say that there are four unproduced scripts that had been presented to Paramount prior to the merger, including one that had franchise mastermind Michael Bay attached to return as director.
Bay directed the first five “Transformers” films from 2007 to 2017, with three of those films grossing more than $1 billion worldwide. After his departure, the Travis Knight-directed spinoff “Bumblebee” became the first film in the series to fall below $500 million despite critical praise with a $468 million global total in winter 2018. The summer 2023 follow-up, “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” directed by Steven Caple Jr., grossed $441 million.
Bay had expressed a willingness to return to “Transformers” prior to the Skydance merger, when the studio was led by Brian Robbins and film division chiefs Mike Ireland and Daria Cercek. But Paramount was experimenting with ways to bring the franchise to the big screen in a different style.
The result of that experiment was the animated prequel “Transformers One,” which came with a budget that was roughly half of the live-action/CGI counterparts. While the prequel was warmly embraced by hardcore “Transformers” fans, it didn’t translate to a wider audience at the box office with $129.4 million grossed worldwide from its September 2024 release, 71% down from “Rise of the Beasts.”
Such a drop suggests that the fandom created by Bay’s “Transformers” had not significantly grown the fandom for “Transformers” as a whole, at least not to the point that there was widespread interest for a different take on the series that offered an origin story for Optimus Prime and Megatron. Given the nature of film development, the next “Transformers” film, if and when it comes, will arrive more than a decade after Bay’s exit from the franchise. Whether to bring him back, continue with another director but in his style, or try something completely different with the IP will be a major decision facing the new Paramount brass.
Building connections
Of course, there’s also the question of how Greenstein, Goldberg and Granger will steer Paramount when it comes to building new relationships with filmmakers. During the Robbins era, Paramount deepened its relationship with “A Quiet Place” director John Krasinski, who pivoted from horror to family filmmaking last year with the modestly successful fantasy “IF” and will return to “Quiet Place” with a third installment in July 2027.
Other partnerships established by Paramount recently include Damien Chazelle, whom the studio inked a first-look deal with despite the box office bombing of his provocative and profane Hollywood period dramedy “Babylon.” A more successful film was Parker Finn’s horror movie “Smile,” which yielded the director his own first-look deal as well as a sequel.
At least on that front, we’ve already got a move from the New Paramount regime. Just hours into their new tenure, Goldberg and Greenstein announced that they had won a bidding war for “High Side,” a crime thriller package about superbike bank heists that will see director James Mangold reunite with his “A Complete Unknown” star Timothée Chalamet.
