Paramount

Paramount’s ‘Transformers’ series is in the process of getting a major rebrand.

John Krasinski’s horror hit is officially getting a sequel to shush you into terror once again.

We haven’t seen the last of ‘Transformers,’ or any of Hasbro’s other properties on the big screen. The toy company has now struck up a new deal with Paramount.

Leonardo DiCaprio has made a career out of playing historical individuals who were too smart for their own good. From Catch Me If You Can to The Aviator to J. Edgar to The Wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio’s niche is to play fiercely intelligent men whose vision often exceeded their grasp. So who better to play someone as notoriously ahead of his time  —  and just as notoriously impatient when it came to finishing projects  —  as Leonardo da Vinci? The world-renowned painter, architect, and inventor will apparently be the subject of an upcoming biography, one that DiCaprio’s production company quickly snapped up before it even hit bookshelves.

Paramount has been doing some release date reshuffling, and, oddly enough, they’ve moved another one of this year”s movies up a couple days. Now, Transformers: The Last Knight will open in theaters Wednesday, June 21, instead of that Friday, June 23. Interesting.

Some months back, we learned legendary author Anne Rice had in mind to shepherd a Vampire Chronicles TV series of “the highest quality,” and it looks like Paramount is ready to sink their teeth in. All eleven novels have officially been optioned for TV adaptation with Anonymous Content, and a familiar writer at the helm.

Paramount hasn't been historically known for their baller moves, but when it comes to their bold anti-promotional campaign for Martin Scorsese's Silence, game must recognize game. Keeping a major awards horse almost entirely on the down-low until one month before its December 23 release is one thing; when that movie also happens to be a passion project decades in the making from what very well might be our greatest living filmmaker — American or otherwise — well, that's just showing off. A Martin Scorsese movie sells itself, and Paramount has now reminded the moviegoing public of why that is.

This past weekend, Paramount Pictures kicked off the publicity tour for its upcoming Ghost in the Shell adaptation with a global launch party in Tokyo. Cast and crew were on hand to talk about the film; exhibitions of the film’s art and costume designs were on display for those in attendance. For the rest of us, something even better was announce: the first theatrical trailer for Ghost in the Shell is here, and it is not exactly short on style.

Everybody wants James Bond, but there’s only one 007. Plenty of franchises have fashioned their own “rough-hewn, American” slant on Bond, with the likes of Jack Ryan and Jason Bourne both jumping from the pages of novels to the screen and meeting with great success. And yet none of these secret agents have achieved the ubiquity of MI6’s favorite son, and so the studios continue to launch new espionage franchises in the hope of scoring a similar 25-movie gold mine.

In a hundred years from now, when some bespectacled historian sits down to write the story of the G.I. Joe film franchise, the first sentence he’ll write will be, “Why did Paramount Pictures want so badly to get rid of Channing Tatum?” Then he’ll underline that sentence about a hundred different times, crinkle the whole page up into a ball, and throw that ball back into his desk drawer. In hindsight, he’s got a lot of movies to write about and it wasn’t the brightest idea to start with G.I. Joe.