Studio Report Cards: Paramount

TheWrap has done a series of Studio Report Cards assessing how well — or not — the major studios did in terms of box office performance in 2010. I’ll be featuring excerpts from those articles each day for the next week or so. Today: Paramount:

Paramount
Grade: B+
The mountain had only one dud in 2010, the Harrison Ford/Diane Keaton comedy “Morning Glory,” while managing to pull off a nifty follow-up to “Paranormal Activity.” But it released just 13 movies, and produced only a few itself. Taking a risk counts, too.

Film-for-film, no studio had a better distribution year than Paramount, which saw seven of the 13 movies it released in 2010 gross more than $100 million domestically.

And the studio is ending the year on a high note, with “The Fighter” and “True Grit” both over-performing at the box office as they garner awards attention.

Despite that 13-film release total — lowest of the majors and the same as Lionsgate — Paramount was second in domestic market share, controlling 16.1 percent of all North American theaterical revenue, trailing only to Warner (18.3 percent according to Box Office Mojo).

“We’ve had a pretty spectacular year,” Paramount Pictures vice chairman Rob Moore told TheWrap. “To be in second place in market share is really an accomplishment.”

With a similarly sized slate for 2011, Moore said Paramount and corporate parent Viacom remain comfortable with “doing the most with the fewest.”

However, not only does the studio limit the number of shots it takes, but its limited exposure on many movies curtails just how profitable a wildly successful year at the box office can be.

Even though Paramount released seven of the top 20 domestic revenue earners this year, three — “How to Train Your Dragon,” “Shrek Forever After” and “Megamind” — came out of distribution service deals with producer DreamWorks Animation, while others, like “Iron Man 2,” were co-productions (the latter with Disney-owned Marvel).

Tomorrow: Lionsgate.