Paramount is betting big on entering the streaming wars, with the official rebrand from CBS All Access to Paramount+ happening on March 4th, and the platform is already lining up some huge original projects to entice subscribers to hand over their money.
The Halo TV show that’s currently shooting in Budapest has been pulled from the Showtime schedule and will now take pride of place among the streamer’s lineup of original episodic content, and it’s been announced that subsidiary Paramount Players will be delivering three to four feature films on an annual basis, and one of them is the upcoming seventh installment in the Paranormal Activity franchise.
The found footage series may have been absent from our screens since The Ghost Dimension was released in 2015, but this is still huge news for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that Paranormal Activity is one of the most profitable brands in the history of cinema, with the previous six movies combining to earn over $890 million at the box office on total production costs of less than $30 million.
While a low budget property with a massive built-in fanbase is a smart move to maximize the size of the audience and potential surge in customers without having to break the bank, the fact that each new Paranormal Activity has turned a serious profit in theaters means that Paramount could potentially be losing out on a lot of money if the latest effort doesn’t have the desired affect on subscriber numbers.
Then again, takings have dropped significantly over the last four movies from the $207 million raked in by Paranormal Activity 3 to the $78 million haul of The Ghost Dimension, so in all honesty, continuing the franchise exclusively on streaming is probably the right decision.