Orion Pictures Pivoting From Genre Films to Projects Featuring Underrepresented Voices

Naming producer Alana Mayo to oversee the division, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer announced today that the Orion Pictures banner will be transformed from a haven for genre work like The Belko Experiment and Bill & Ted Face the Music and into a banner promoting underrepresented voices. She will head up a greenlight committee, made up of exclusively women so far, that will decide what movies Orion makes or acquires for distribution. The committee does not include MGM’s chairman, Michael DeLuca, effectively making Mayo the highest authority on what kind of stories Orion will tell for the foreseeable future. Orion is expected to release about three movies a year with a maximum budget of around $15 million.

That rate is just about normal for Orion even now. MGM’s main studio does higher-budget movies, with an output of about ten per year. The idea is to fulfill the pledges that studios and distributors were making a month ago, to reshape the people making decisions so that more equal opportunities can present themselves.

“As a person who is a woman and Black and queer, I want to create something that will hopefully make other people like me feel like they are finally a part of the Hollywood system,” Mayo told the New York Times.

She added, “One of the most exciting things about this opportunity is being able to greenlight movies. Who gets to say ‘yes’ is massively important. A lot of studio executives still have a fairly myopic view of what and who is film worthy. The human experience is 360 degrees. We have been looking at 20.”

John Hegeman, who has been Orion’s president since 2017, will leave the company, as will most of his management team, per the Times.

Orion was founded in 1978 and remained in business until 1999. After it went out of business, it was dormant for a while, with only home video releases to remind people that it ever existed. Then, in 2014, it returned with movies like The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The Belko Experiment, and Burn County. The last big success for the studio was the Child’s Play remake, although Bill & Ted Face the Music is expected to do fairly well, especially given its relatively modest budget.

For now, before Mayo can start developing new films, there are a number of in-development projects that are likely still going to move forward at Orion, including Songs of the Damned, a Night of the Comet remake, and the Netflix film Bad Trip.