President of production�alongside Mike Paseornek
A year and a half after leaving Paramount, Alli Shearmur has landed at Lionsgate as chief Executive of motion picture production alongside longtime Lionsgate production head Mike Paseornek.
Shearmur and Paseornek, wHO will each carry the same title, will write up to co-COO and motion picture radical president Joe Drake. Shearmur's lock on the position has been in the air for some time, and she officially starts Tuesday.
"I'm selfsame excited to be part of a team once more," Shearmur aforementioned. "I'm most looking fore to being at a place that has a real sentiency of momentum and an agile, discernment approach to making movies. They appear to be very creative, out-of-the-box thinkers."
While Paseornek has helped to build the mini-major into an more and more ambitious studio, he and Shearmur will now fundamentally run two separate production divisions, with each turn out six-spot to eight films per year. The studio claims that these slates will remain passably undefined, Paseornek will focus on Lionsgate's bread-and-butter writing style projects, such as urban comedy and horror, patch Shearmur testament shepherd larger-scale, talent-driven mainstream productions.
The repose of the in-house yield team will be schism among the two wings, with production vps Jim Miller and Wolfgang Hammer reporting to Shearmur and executive vp Lisa Ellzey and senior vp John Sacchi staying in Paseornek's camp.
"As Lionsgate continues to expand, our goal on the motion picture production side is to foster an environs characterized by creativity and focus," Drake said. "Alli has superb instincts in developing properties, and she brings a substantial base of talent relationships into the Lionsgate fold. She is a terrific complement to Mike, and together they ar going to build upon the formidable infrastructure and brand identity that Mike has already established."
Shearmur exhausted several age as an executive at Walt Disney Pictures and then at Universal, where she had a hand in launching the "American Pie" and "Bourne" series. She and then moved to Paramount, where she was promoted to co-president of production under Gail Berman in early 2005. That tenure complete in disappointment when Paramount topper Brad Grey let Berman and Shearmur go in January 2007, going Shearmur's co-president, Brad Weston, in charge of Paramount's production division.
Shearmur is a producer on Doug Liman's DreamWorks ignoble moon figure being written by Dan Mazeau.
It power not take long to see whether a power-sharing arrangement will work for Paseornek and Shearmur tending Lionsgate's belligerent efforts to expand its scope, even without the executives sharing a co-president title.
"Mike Paseornek is awesome at what he does, and he has an incredible running record," Shearmur said. "As people continue to do business with us at Lionsgate, it's going to be clear where to bring the movies, and it's such a friendly, collaborative work environment that it should be a very easy process to manage. It's really enlighten what Mike has been brilliant at."
Lionsgate recently re-upped its arranging with Tyler Perry for another trey years, and it acquired a $340 million credit facility with J.P. Morgan.
On the development horizon are "Warrior," which Gavin O'Connor co-wrote and will engineer; "Conan," a fast-tracked project with multiple scripts in the workings; "Severance Package," with Brett Simon writing and guiding; "Rambo V," to be written and directed by Sylvester Stallone; "Korean Wedding" from writer Jason Filardi; and "Kane & Lynch," a picture game adaptation that will star Bruce Willis.
The studio has generated nearly a half billion dollars in boxoffice this past financial year. Its fall slate includes "Disaster Movie" (opening Friday), "Bangkok Dangerous" (Sept. 5), "Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys" (Sept. 12), "Religulous" (Oct. 3), "W" (Oct. 17), "Saw V" (Oct. 24) and "The Spirit" (Dec. 25).
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