So the weekend for entertainment giant Paramount (PARA) turned out to be a lot more exciting by itself than pretty much anything it had to release in the meantime. It brought in a backhanded victory at the box office, but it also lost a key figure going into what it still hopes will be a merger. Paramount investors by now have learned to take their wins where they can be found, and gave shares a fractional boost in the closing minutes of Friday’s trading.
The good news for Paramount this weekend was that it managed to take the top slot at the weekend box office. And that is a achievement by most any standard you care to name. Paramount’s action comedy Novocaine—which you may remember from the kerfuffle over using an artificial intelligence voice-over in some promotional material—took the top slot. But that was where the problems began.
The problem was how much Novocaine actually took in to land that top slot: around $8.5 million, reports noted. In fact, reports noted, this was actually a worse weekend for the movies, in general, than Super Bowl Sunday weekend proved to be. The second place finisher, Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD) Mickey 17 took in $7.6 million, while the third place hit, Comcast’s (CMCSA) Black Bag, pulled in just a hair less at $7.5 million.
It Only Got Worse From There
So while Paramount proved to be the king of a vast wasteland with this weekend’s box office figures, it also managed to get worse as Paramount lost a key figure: its executive vice president of corporate strategy. John Curbishley, who previously worked on the merger between Paramount and ViacomCBS, and also survived the pandemic, actually left last year, and has taken a new position.
Curbishley will now serve as Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at the BBC, which, based on current reports, could use some shoring up in the strategy department. The BBC’s charter renewal is coming up in two years, reports note, and the British government is apparently looking quite closely at its funding model. Thus, bolstering the numbers will likely prove helpful as the BBC tries to make a case for keeping cash coming in.
Is Paramount Stock a Good Buy Right Now?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Hold consensus rating on PARA stock based on two Buys, six Holds and five Sells assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 5.8% rally in its share price over the past year, the average PARA price target of $12.50 per share implies 6.97% upside potential.
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