Lionsgate, the leisure firm behind blockbuster franchises such because the Starvation Video games and Twilight, will carve out and checklist its studio enterprise via a merger with a blank-cheque firm in a deal that values the division at $4.6bn.
Screaming Eagle Acquisition Company, a particular objective acquisition firm arrange by veteran Hollywood executives Harry Sloan and Jeff Sagansky, will merge with Lionsgate’s studio enterprise.
The newly created Lionsgate Studios will home the tv studio and movement image divisions of the group, which is behind franchises equivalent to John Wick in addition to Oscar-winning movie La La Land. It can additionally embody the corporate’s expertise administration and its manufacturing and distribution companies.
Lionsgate Studio expects to obtain a complete of $350mn as a part of the transaction, half of which is able to come from the money held within the Spac belief and the rest from a so-called non-public funding in public fairness.
Streaming platform Starz will likely be stay below Lionsgate’s possession.
The deal to carve out Lionsgate Studios from the already public Lionsgate is uncommon for a Spac, which generally raises cash on the inventory market and hunts for a personal enterprise to take public. Lionsgate will proceed to carry 87.3 per cent of the overall shares within the newly fashioned firm with Screaming Eagle proudly owning the remainder.
“This transaction creates one of many world’s largest publicly traded pure-play content material platforms,” Lionsgate chief govt Jon Feltheimer and vice-chair Michael Burns stated in a press release on Friday.
The trio behind Screaming Eagle, which incorporates chief govt Eli Baker, has had blended success with previous Spacs. They helped take public US sports-betting group DraftKings, which now trades at 5 occasions its preliminary valuation and is broadly thought-about among the many most profitable blank-cheque firm offers ever.
Nevertheless, a deal to checklist Invoice Gates-backed Ginkgo Bioworks at a $15bn valuation has backfired, with the corporate is presently value a fraction of that.
The plan to spin out Lionsgate Studios comes two years after Screaming Eagle’s Sloan, the previous chair of Hollywood studio MGM, joined Lionsgate’s board of administrators.