The move of Josh Greenstein from Sony Pictures to Paramount Global has had ripple effects across the Culver City lot. Sony Pictures unveiled its restructuring of its senior film leadership ranks under motion pictures chief Tom Rothman, who ranks as the unrivaled elder statesman of studio leaders in this turbulent moment for Hollywood.
On the latest episode of “Daily Variety” podcast, Brent Lang, Variety‘s executive editor who steers our film coverage, discusses the impact of Greenstein’s long-expected move from the co-president spot at Sony Pictures to a significant role at the new-model Paramount Global that will emerge following the studio’s final sale to Skydance Media and RedBird Capital next month. Greenstein’s exit leaves industry veteran Sanford Panitch as sole president of the film group under Rothman.
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“Mostly this just kind of clarifies what everybody had assumed was going to happen, which was that Josh was going to move over to Paramount. This has been in the works for over a year,” Lang explains. “What it does is it just formalizes that Sanford Panitch is going to remain at the studio as president of the Motion Picture Group. was co-president with Josh. And it elevates Peter Kang to be in charge of production, which is a very large role that oversees the kind of the day-to-day operations of all the different things that are filming.”
At the top of the film pyramid under Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Ravi Ahuja is Rothman, the Fox veteran who took the reins of film at Sony in 2015. Rothman is “a legendary studio head, who’s become the elder statesman of Hollywood,” Lang observes.
The episode also includes a Vintage Variety tutorial on Variety‘s famous slanguage. The glossary of terms that we invented that made their way into mainstream use includes sitcom, soap opera, biopic and disk jockey. In this installment, we define “tubthump,” as used below in this Daily Variety report on Humphrey Bogart from April 17, 1952.
(Pictured: Josh Greenstein)
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