In the latest studio streamlining move Paramount Pictures has absorbed Paramount Players under the leadership of motion picture group co-heads Daria Cercek and Michael Ireland.
Paramount Players president Jeremy Kramer will step down after 18 months overseeing the division, which was initially set up for current Paramount Pictures president and CEO Brian Robbins to make youth-oriented films in conjunction with flagship brands under what was then the Viacom stable.
Robbins said the goal of folding Players into the motion picture group was to use the big studio’s “power” to scale the expertise and projects within Players.
As part of the reorganisation of the creative group Cercek and Ireland have promoted three creative executives. Former SVP of production Ashley Brucks becomes head of development at Paramount Players and former SVP’s Jonathan Gonda and Vanessa Joyce are made EVP’s of production.
Players’ credits include Dora And The Lost City Of Gold and Playing With Fire. The division went quiet after Robbins left to run Nickelodeon until it was revived in late 2020 by then president of Paramount’s motion picture group Emma Watts, who had worked with Kramer at Fox.
Watts left the studio last September after Robbins replaced CEO and chairman and longtime Watts ally Jim Gianopulos, the industry veteran who hired Awesomeness founder Robbins to run Players back in 2017.
Players’ upcoming projects include Apartment 7A starring Julia Garner and produced by John Krasinski and Allyson Seeger’s Sunday Night and Michael Bay, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller’s Platinum Dunes; On The Come Up, an adaptation of Angie Thomas’s follow-up book to The Hate U Give on which Sanaa Lathan makes her directorial debut; sci-fi thriller Significant Other starring Maika Monroe and Jake Lacy and directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen; comedy Senior Year starring Rebel Wilson; and Parker Finn’s Something’s Wrong With Rose starring Sosie Bacon and produced by Temple Hill.
Robbins said Kramer, who was also an executive at Red Hour Films, DreamWorks and Miramax and has overseen more than 60 films including Disturbia, She’s All That, Blades Of Glory, Tropic Thunder and the Deadpool franchise, played “an integral role in further establishing Players as a youthful, entrepreneurial production arm”.
Cercek and Ireland have led development and production on Paramount’s upcoming slate including the latest instalments in the Transformers and Mission: Impossible franchises, Sandra Bullock’s The Lost City, a sequel to Sonic The Hedgehog, and the adventure epic Dungeons & Dragons, among others.
Former DreamWorks executive Brucks joined Paramount in 2008 and has worked on Scream, A Quiet Place and Paranormal Activity. Joyce arrived in 2012 from Summit as a creative executive. Gonda joined in 2017 as a VP of production after serving as a creative executive at Warner Bros and a director of development at Fox Writers Studio.
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