Joel Hedrick.
Joel Hedrick, entertainment One’s former sales manager, theatrical, for Australia/New Zealand, has joined Paramount Pictures.
Hedrick has been appointed senior sales and operations executive, managing the distributor’s relationships with exhibitors. He takes over from Mike Jones, who moved across to Universal Pictures.
Paramount’s upcoming slate includes Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman, which stars Taron Egerton as Elton John, Alexandre Aja’s horror movie Crawl, James Bobin’s Gold Coast-filmed Dora and the Lost City of Gold and Ang Lee’s sci-fi thriller Gemini Man, which stars Will Smith, Clive Owen and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
He spent nearly three years at eOne, which handed responsibility for theatrical distribution and marketing of its releases to Universal from April 1.
Concurrently Universal Pictures Home Entertainment (UPHE) took over home entertainment distribution of eOne’s product, previously handled by Fox Home Entertainment.
For three and half years he was VP, Asia Pacific, theatrical, at box office tracking service Rentrak before departing to co-found competitor Numero, where he served as chief operating officer.
His CV includes general manager of the Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia and EDI product manager at Nielsen.