Jim Packer, president of worldwide television distribution at Lionsgate, is betting the upcoming spin off of his Hollywood studio’s film and TV production and library business will become a franchise machine.
“It’s clear it’s going to be an IP-focused company. It’s going to produce, distribute, film and TV,” Packer told the Gabelli Media & Entertainment Symposium during a session that was webcast. He pointed to the upcoming Michael Jackson biopic Michael, directed by Antoine Fuqua and set for an April 2025 release.
“The buzz that we’re getting every time a photo gets released is kind of crazy. And I think that’ll be the biggest movie we’ve ever had,” Packer forecast. On the intellectual property front, he also pointed to Lionsgate’s Hunger Games movie series, which has brought in around $3.3 billion in box office to date.
“We’ve taken that franchise and it doesn’t map to Harry Potter, but from a financial standpoint and an IP standpoint, it’s as important to us as Harry Potter is to Warner Bros,” Packer told the Gabelli conference. His comments followed Suzanne Collins and her publisher Scholastic on Thursday morning announcing that a new installment in The Hunger Games series, the novel Sunrise on the Reaping, will be released next year.
Movies are key for Packer as his distirbution team generally gets titles after their initial theatrical release to sell across TV and other ancillary platforms. And with the rise of streaming and other digital platforms, including ad-driven FAST channels, Packer said Lionsgate has a host of new TV customers to sell content to.
He argued Lionsgate remains agnostic in terms of selling original content to rival platforms, and is not focused on only feeding the Hollywood studio’s premium Starz service. “I wouldn’t go as far as (vice chairman) Michael Burns, who always says we’re a benevolent arms dealer. I don’t like that term. I am open to doing business and we do business with everyone,” Packer said.
(In 2016, Burns told CNBC that he regarded Netflix as a customer like any other as the streaming giant stepped up its own original content production. “We’re a benevolent arms dealer, so we’ll sell to anyone,” he told the network.)
Packer said he has to weigh the size of a platform looking to license content from his studio, in addition to the dollars placed on the table. “In a situation where somebody is going to offer my team more per-month on a movie like John Wick or Hunger Games for one month, versus somebody wants to buy five months at a little less, we might go five, because it’s a balance of the two,” Packer insisted.
The calculations for content licensing have been complicated by most streaming platforms, including Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, increasingly launching cheaper, ad-driven tiers.
“Many of my buyers are (asking) what buyer had it right before me and where they selling ads against it, because I have to sell ads against it. So that’s another layer now because almost every single one of our SVOD clients has ads,” Packer said.