Copyright Deadline
Lionsgate chief executive Jon Feltheimer said ongoing media and entertainment M&A noise is “incredibly disruptive” to the industry. “All we can do is keep sticking to our knitting … doing what we do, and we’ll see where the bouncing ball ends up. There will be some interesting bedfellows, I think,” he said on call with analysts after quarterly earnings. Paramount closed its acquisition of Skydance in August after 18 months. Now it’s bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery, which may sell or may spit in half. Uncertainty is the worst, agreed Lionsgate Television Chairman Kevin Beggs. “When it’s hanging over the market, it makes everybody buy a little bit less. The extended process of Skydance and Paramount froze Paramount for a long time. We’re pretty excited about that being resolved. They’ve laid out to the selling community what they’re looking for there. They have an appetite to buy more dramas, more scripted in general. “I think you’re going to see more clarity around Comcast between the Peacock-NBC Studio side and Versant,” he said on the call, referencing another corporate shift with Comcast in the process of spinning off its cable networks into a standalone public company. Beggs said industry consolidation can cut both ways for suppliers of content like Lionsgate. “There can be less spending. But often [there are] stronger buyers that have a bigger appetite and are signaling to the selling community that they’re healthy. That’s a positive.” Obviously, having fewer buyers is less desirable, “but unhealthy buyers are not good.”
