Over the course of his relatively short career, filmmaker Damien Chazelle has taken each of his projects to a new studio each time. It’s almost as if he’s testing the waters with the various studios. Or, more accurately, every single project he works on is actively bid on by everyone in Hollywood and he just goes with the attractive deal. Well, for his next film, “Babylon,” the best deal apparently came from Paramount.
According to THR, Paramount is now lined up as the distributor for the upcoming film “Babylon,” which will be written and directed by Chazelle. The film is said to focus on the era of Hollywood that saw the transition of classic silent films to the “talkies” in the late-1920s. And yes, as was reported back in July, actors Brad Pitt and Emma Stone are still in talks to star in the film.
If the deals come to fruition, Pitt will portray a fictional character that is the star of silent films that is unable to make the transition to the new era of Hollywood. The report claims that he’s based on the real-life story of John Gilbert. Stone, on the other hand, would play Clara Bow, who is widely recognized as the first “It” girl of Hollywood.
And while Chazelle is an Oscar-winning filmmaker himself, it appears that his massive 180-page script and $100 million budget for “Babylon” had a couple of studios worried about making the leap. Apparently, the report claims that Paramount was able to compromise with Chazelle and get him to reduce the script by 30 pages and thus, reducing the budget. But even still, it appears that “Babylon” is going to be a big-budget period film about Hollywood, which will likely draw some surface-level comparisons to Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” which has been a pretty big success for Sony.
In addition to the announcement that Paramount is on board, the studio also confirmed that “Babylon” will get a prime release date of December 25, 2021, putting it firmly in that year’s awards race.
