Viacom To Lose Big Money from Paramount (may affect Nickelodeon)

This is pretty much more on the business side and is remotely tied to animation at all, but Nickelodeon is under ownership of Viacom. And when something goes wrong, like the corporation losing money, it will have a ripple effect.

Quote from The Street:

"Viacom executives who had been negotiating with potential buyers to sell a 49% stake in its Paramount studio, however, suddenly have a much shakier asset to peddle.

The studio, which some analysts said could fetch as much as $5 billion, is having one of the worst summers in recent Hollywood history and could lose as much as $560 million through 2017, according to one analyst.

The company's Paramount studio began the summer with the June release of the big-budget Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, which generated a relatively puny $81.5 million in ticket sales that the company blamed for the studio's $26 million loss in its fiscal second quarter. On Friday Paramount releases another big-budget movie, a remake of the iconic 1959 film Ben-Hur (itself a remake) that Hollywood insiders already forecast will open with a thud.

The biggest disappointment for investors, however, is Paramount's apparent inability to send its flagship Star Trek movie franchise into warp drive. The studio spent $185 million to make the latest installment, Star Trek Beyond, which stars Chris Pine as a younger Captain Kirk, and another $120 million to market it.

Released on July 22, the movie has so far generated $142 million in domestic ticket sales, according to movie site Box Office Mojo, 60% less than the 2013 installment, Star Trek Into Darkness, despite the benefit of higher ticket prices three years later."

That's a lot of money lost for the movie studio. It doesn't help either that Paramount is even alienating its Star Trek fans by making a set of rules for their fan films. As a former Trekker, I would say Paramount killed their franchise and gone are the glory days of the original series, Next Generation, and Voyager.

What does this mean for Nickelodeon? Maybe nothing at all, or maybe the loss could affect that network in terms of their annual budget. If the latter's true, expect Nick to make more lame teen-dramas and sticking to Spongebob yet again.