Are you ready for yet another major Hollywood merger?! Of course, you are! With both Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount-Skydance mergers going so well! Horrible jokes aside, Legendary Entertainment is possibly acquiring Lionsgate Studios.
Legendary is behind cinematic powerhouses like “Dune,” “Godzilla,” and “The Minecraft Movie,” while Lionsgate has “John Wick” and “The Hunger Games.” We haven’t seen this much cool crossover potential since Atomic Monster and Blumhouse merged.
This is all coming on the heels of Lionsgate splitting from STARZ by separating its cable network from the studio end. Its film and tv divisions alone host a content library of over 20,000 titles.
Legendary has had some shake-ups as well. Last year, it was purchased by the private equity firm Apollo from Dalian Wanda Group.
“We had management control and we had creative control before the deal, so nothing really changes on that front,” Josh Grode, Legendary CEO, said at the time of the purchase. “I think probably the only thing that maybe is no longer there, is when we would have conversations around large scale M&A, we would have to deal with the foreign ownership issue, and that’s now no longer an issue.”
Specific details about the deal are under wraps, but it’s being reported that the companies will be collaborating on some films and building from there.
Both Lionsgate and Legendary have declined to comment on a potential merger at this time. We’ll keep you posted on updates about this situation as it develops.
