“Will Lionsgate Be the Next Studio to Kick the Bucket?”
Alex Billington at FirstShowing.net asks that question in this column after some unsettling news on the business front:
Apparently the investing bank Caris & Co. recently downgraded the shares of Lionsgate Entertainment (stock symbol LGF) to “above average” from “buy” based on early reports of the poor performance of The Spirit. We’re not going to go into the investing side of things, but the most interesting observation is that the analyst for Caris & Co. stated that “the future health of the studio might well be tied to its January 16, 2009 release of My Bloody Valentine 3-D.”
The Spirit has not fared well, either with critics or more importantly at the box office, generating to this point only $12.5M. Billington’s post goes through a litany of LionsGate movies in 2008 that underperformed including Punisher: War Zone, My Best Friend’s Girl, and Bangkok Dangerous. We’ll be checking the spec script market starting tomorrow, but it’s interesting to note that LionsGate only acquired two specs in 2008: “Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty” in May and “31 Days of Larry” in late November.
No matter what a screenwriter’s relationship is with a studio or their feelings about particular execs, how they’ve been treated, how their movies have been handled, any company that folds means one less buyer — and that’s never good news.
UPDATE: In some good news for the specialty market, the NY Times reports today:
In a deal that signifies further reordering in Hollywood’s specialty movie business, the Universal Pictures unit of General Electric completed its sale of Rogue Pictures, a maker and distributor of lower-cost films, to Relativity Media for about $150 million.
Rogue had a big hit with The Strangers which grossed over $50M. And what about Relativity Media:
Relativity has been a major backer of films for Universal, Sony and others. The company has agreed to provide about $3 billion in financing for Universal films through 2015, and has already contributed to recent releases including “Frost/Nixon” and “Role Models.”
“It doesn’t actually change the character of our company, it just further expands the business plan,” Ryan Kavanaugh, Relativity’s chief executive said on Sunday. Mr. Kavanaugh said he expected Rogue to produce a wider range of supernatural horror and other films than it had made under Universal, which occasionally restricted the unit’s offerings to keep it from competing with the main studio operation.
Relativity Media was pretty active in the spec script market acquiring 4 scripts in 2008. More on that starting tomorrow.
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