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Earlier today, Paramount finally finished selling itself to Skydance Media, a merger that has seen the company bend over backwards, sell out its own stated principles, and bow to bullies in the highest offices of power in order to make it happen. But now it’s finally done, and “New Paramount” is here to shake things up, do something new, and generally make use of all that hard-won, dearly bought freedom. Which is to say, hire the two guys who just brought in a bunch of Oscar nominations for Disney last year, to see if they can’t work that magic again.
This is per THR, which reports that the very first acquisition Paramount has made in its new incarnation is High Side, a biker film that will team back up A Complete Unknown‘s James Mangold and Timothée Chalamet, albeit for something that sounds a bit more Fast And Furious than “Will this odd little man play an electric guitar in a way that makes the folk musicians very mad?” Specifically, the film comes from an unpublished story from Jaime Oliveira, and centers on “A former MotoGP racer. Haunted by a career-ending crash and a family legacy of abandonment, he is drawn back into the world of high-speed risks and extreme danger when his estranged brother, already being pursued by the FBI, recruits him for a series of bank robberies on superbikes.” Which definitely sounds like Mangold is back in his Ford Vs. Ferrari mindset, which it’s hard to complain about. (Honestly, they had us at “bank robberies on superbikes,” an extremely powerful phrase in terms of activating the 12-year-old kid portions of the human brain.)
Notably, the acquisition makes it clear that Paramount is looking to throw some money around to re-make its name under the new ownership; High Side was reportedly a “competitive situation,” meaning the studio beat out a bunch of other companies that were not also busy throwing “settlement money” at the current administration in order to smooth things over with the FCC. Mangold, at least, sounds enthusiastic about the project, praising his co-producers and calling Chalamet “a trusted collaborator, a generational artist and a person I adore. I can’t wait to roll up my sleeves and work together again.”
