The past few weeks have been major in terms of mergers and acquisitions in Hollywood as WarnerMedia and Discovery are poised to become a major entity and Amazon is gearing up to swallow MGM whole. After The Walt Disney Company absorbed 20th Century Fox it was only a matter of time before the other big fish got hungry again. The most recent batch of merger news prompted Sony to announce that they weren’t for sale, but that’s not the case for everyone. Speaking during the company earnings call, Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer seemed to allude to the fact that the studio isn’t looking to be sold….not yet.
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“Both of the big deals that have happened within what the last two or three weeks I think are pretty simple. They’re a resounding affirmation, I’d say about the value of content, the value of IPs, and the value of brands,” Feltheimer said. “I think sort of our approach and where we fit in is pretty simple at this point in time, which is, with all this disruption, I think we’ve got a benefit in terms of lack of disruption here at the company and of cohesiveness. And I think that’s the key thing that we’re going to do is keep our head down, and just keep executing on our plan. I think the thing that we don’t want to get distracted by frankly is this concept of scale, because we think our job is actually just to create for our shareholders outside value.”
He continued, “That’s what we think we’re doing with STARZ. When people refer to us like this morning in one of those M&A articles as having a niche service. We don’t think 30 million subs is a niche service. If we wanted to be in niche services, obviously, we wouldn’t have sold Pantaya. So, we think 30 going to 60 are that’s a big business, we want to be the market leader in premium. And that’s how we’ll build our value. So obviously, we talked to everyone, we listened to everything. But our main job right now, as I say is to create outsized value in the way we’re going to do is by keeping our head down, having all of our businesses talk to each other 10 times a day, which is what they do. So that again, as Michael and I’ve said before, one plus one plus one is way more than three.”
According to Deadline, Alan Gould of Loop Capital called Lionsgate an “attractive” prospect for a potential buyer, valuing the studio (which owns Summit Entertainment, Starz, and Lionsgate Home Entertainment) at least at $8 billion. Anyone that acquired Lionsgate would gain a library that includes franchises like The Hunger Games, John Wick, Saw, The Expendables, and more.
Lionsgate was previously considering sales talks with studios back in 2018 with Amazon, Viacom, and Comcast all making a play for the company. It’s unclear if any of those companies would be interested once again.
