Sometimes this job is incredibly easy. The studios will occasionally do the work for you, like making a movie that is almost guaranteed to be a disaster. Paramount Pictures faces just such a case with Monster Trucks, a Mattel-based film they hoped would be a franchise but has the studio projecting a huge financial loss. Awesome, no need for me to speculate on its prospects.
It was THR who caught wind of of Paramount parent company Viacom's financial projections, noting “a programming impairment charge” of $115M for an unspecified film due to a lower than expected performance at the box office. It seems they had intended the movie, which stars X-Men: First Class and MacGyver's Lucas Till, as a broad film appealing to all ages. What they got instead was a movie geared towards kids, following some kind of alien goo creature that likes to drive trucks. Hence..."monster trucks". Ho ho ho. It doesn't help that the film was intended to hit theaters more than a year ago but has been knocked around the schedule multiple times, ultimately ending up on the dumping ground of next January.
All of this comes as Paramount has been getting its ass kicked all year with Star Trek Beyond, TMNT 2, and Ben-Hur under-performing badly. So this certainly won't help. Maybe they ought to stick to Transformers movies for a while?
