Paramount Is Sitting on a $100 Million Reparations Musical. Why?

Since the early days of South Park, series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have operated on a week-to-week schedule, with the final cut of each episode usually sent to Comedy Central just hours before it airs Wednesday night.

Parker and Stone’s upcoming feature — their first as director-producers since 2004 puppet classic Team America: World Police, and first in live-action since 1997’s Orgazmo — has needed much longer than that.

The untitled film, known internally at Paramount as Whitney Springs, has been placed on the back burner. But that’s a far cry from shelving some low-budget indie. Sources familiar with the deal tell me Paramount committed more than $100 million to the project through a negative pickup — where the creators keep what is left from the budget.

One of the people familiar with the arrangement puts the total cost at $150 million; another person familiar with the deal terms suggests it was between $70 and $80 million — for what is, in essence, a musical comedy about reparations for slavery.

And it is stranded at a company whose chief, David Ellison, spent the past year cozying up to Donald Trump to help get his $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery through federal antitrust review — and is now fighting 12 state attorneys general to actually close it.

And it is a uniquely Hollywood mess.

In late 2021, a group of Paramount execs went to the offices of Parker and Stone’s production company, Park County, to read the script, written by South Park veteran Vernon Chatman. It was set to be directed by Parker and produced by Stone, Kendrick Lamar and his business partner Dave Free. “It was fucking amazing,” one person who read the script at the time tells me. Paramount picked up the project in January 2022. At CinemaCon 2024, then-Paramount Pictures honcho Brian Robbins called it “one of the funniest and most original scripts we’ve ever read” and said that the film would be going into production that summer.

The comedy revolves around a historical slave plantation museum in the Midwest and a young Black re-enactor who lashes out at tourists and clashes with the town’s hypocritical, racist mayor, played by Parker.

People familiar with the film say it also contains original, unreleased music by Lamar.

The film was initially set to debut on July 4, 2025. But in March 2025, before the Paramount-Skydance merger closed, it got pushed back to March 20, 2026. Then, last November it was taken off the schedule entirely, and at Ellison’s first CinemaCon as Paramount chief this past April, it wasn’t mentioned at all. 

“We take full responsibility for the schedule delay of this movie,” Stone and Parker said in a statement to The Ankler. “We apologize to our partners at pgLang and Paramount and we appreciate their patience. South Park and life’s circumstances have gotten in the way but we still believe in the project.”

Paramount declined to comment, and pgLang didn’t respond to requests for comment.

This is the story of what’s gone wrong — the “rough” early cuts, how Paramount spread the extraordinary costs across multiple divisions of the company, Parker’s mayor character that one of the sources calls “the epitome of the Republican party,” Parker and Stone’s full statement on the matter, and whether the movie’s politics play a role for Paramount.