Before the Merger Talk: What Paramount’s Upcoming Slate Reveals About Its Strengths
Talk is understandably swirling around Paramount Skydance’s reported dalliance with Warner Bros. Discovery. But before the attention span of the entire industry shifts to the next long-term paradigm-altering mega-transaction, let’s focus on the immediate future. The next six months will be a revealing stretch for Paramount Pictures, which currently sits fifth in domestic box office market share for the year. It’s only ranked in the top three once since 2012. While the movie studio’s performance won’t impact any potential M&A, it can help us better understand its current strengths and weaknesses.
Paramount will deliver three very different types of films across Q4 2025-Q1 2026: a hard-edged action reboot (The Running Man), a four-quadrant animated family play (SpongeBob: The Search for Squarepants) and a new entry in a long-running horror franchise (Scream 7).
Right off the bat, it’s clear that Paramount’s upcoming theatrical efforts will largely be driven by young men. Both The Running Man and Scream 7 show men under 35 as their clearest demo as theatrical intent ranges from 48%-59% and willingness to pay a fee ranges from 61%-77%, according to Greenlight Analytics. Loosely translated into industry speak, Paramount’s tentpole strategy is anchored around this specific demographic. That trickles down to its streaming endeavors as well. Paramount+ is largely driven by male-skewing Taylor Sherdian, Star Trek and CBS series with just a smattering of female-led reality programming.
Scream 7 boasts the highest upside relative to its genre. Awareness (66%) and WTP (77%) are already remarkably high, especially for a film that doesn’t come out until late February. Unaware Interest, or interest among moviegoers who don’t know about Scream 7 but are interested in the concept, is unusually high at 29%. Concentrated mostly among men under 35 (44%) but with tendrils sprouting into other quadrants, it’s clear there’s plenty of persuadable moviegoers left to convert. Unfortunately for David Ellison, even hit horror films tend to have low ceilings on streaming.
The Running Man looks like it will be reliant on multicultural audiences. Awareness among White audiences lags at the moment, but both Black (WTP 61%) and Hispanic/Latino (WTP 61%) demos over-index on monetization potential. Paramount should keep leaning into diverse targeting. The SpongeBob movie is a bit more complicated. Paramount made the curious decision to license two SpongeBob films—Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie (2024) and Plankton: The Movie (2025)—as Netflix exclusives. It remains to be seen if this will hurt the brand’s theatrical potency.
Across all three titles, unaware interest (22%-33%) marks a real opportunity to convert untapped potential audiences. The ability to do so can make the difference between a flop and a hit. Longer-term, if Paramount can use its theatrical releases to both double down on the company’s core audience while strategically expanding to complementary viewers, it can better fuel Paramount+. In doing so, the synergies and complements between Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Skydance become clearer.
