Caroline Dries’ “above-the-line” offer lands at Paramount after bidding war

EXCLUSIVE: In a tough competition with six parties, Paramount Pictures has secured the rights to Overwhelma sexual revenge thriller by Caroline Dries.

Both streamers and traditional studios were involved. According to several sources, other offers came from Amazon, Apple, Skydance, New Line and Sony. According to them, the deal is worth a seven-figure sum.

The film is intended to be a throwback to Paramount’s classic erotic thrillers and shows how a chance encounter between a seemingly perfect couple and a powerful lawyer leads the couple down a frightening path that puts everything in danger. Karen Rosenfelt (The Twilight Saga) will act as producer.

The deal has been described as an encouraging reflection of a market that has been down in most cases due to last year’s damaging one-two punch, and one that shows studios are still more than willing to acquire strong material. It comes just a week after the big reveal that Skydance and Shari Redstone had agreed to terms of a new merger proposal for Paramount.

Dries is a respected veteran writer and producer and most recently served as a consulting producer on The CW’s superhero series. Gotham Knight. Prior to that, he served as creator, showrunner and executive producer of Batwomanwhich ran for three seasons, Dries was also a writer and executive producer of the CW series the Vampire Diarieswhere she made a name for herself as one of Kevin Williamson’s best writers. Other works by Dries include Melrose Square And Smallvillewhere she began her career.

Emmy-nominated for her work as executive producer of Hulu’s DopeSickRosenfelt then took over as executive producer of Prime Video’s romantic youth drama The summer I became pretty. In addition to managing major studio franchises such as The Twilight Saga And Alvin and the Chipmunksshe was producer or EP of films such as The new mutants, I before you, Marley & I And The devil Wears Pradaamong others.

Dries is repped by WME, Entertainment 360 and Wendy Kirk at Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole.