Cut! (but Don't Print): Paramount Pictures Axing 5 Percent of Workforce

P (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 Paramount Pictures, the fifth-oldest surviving movie studio from Hollywood's heyday and a Viacom Intl. Inc. subsidiary, will slash five percent of its 2200-member workforce, the Associated Press reported yesterday.

Roughly 110 positions will be eliminated, according to the AP story, as part of a global reorganization. Paramount CEO Frederick Huntsberry told employees in a memo yesterday that the impact would spread across several departments, including marketing and finance.

A number of successful film series have been cranked out by Paramount over the years, including the Star Trek, Beverly Hills Cop and Shrek franchises, as well as Kung Fu Panda and Friday the 13th.

Pirates Plunder Paramount Pictures

Cover of Star Trek

Paramount Pictures' 2009 twin box-office killings: Star Trek, featuring Chris Pines' star-making turn as Capt. James T. Kirk, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, featuring Megan Fox' mechanical acting, topped the list of films most purloined by online pirates, according to TorrentFreak, a file-sharing tracking company.

J.J. Abrams' Star Trek grossed $258 million, while Michael Bay's Transformers sequel netted $402 million in domestic box office receipts for Viacom-owned Paramount, but pilferers preferred the former, illegally downloading the film "where no man has gone before" just under 11 million times, compared to 10.6 million pirated copies of Transformers, TorrentFreak estimates.

The 2009 entries in the wizard Harry Potter and vampire Twilight series also were among the top 10 bootlegged movies. The movie industry worldwide is believed to lose about $18 billion in revenues internationally, a third of  that in the U.S. alone, because of film piracy.

"TUOL" wonders if more adult fare shown at independent movie houses is absent from the TorrentFreak list because the audience for such films is more principled and law-abiding, or if the pirates are just unwilling to risk jail time for such a shrinking audience.