Hot on the heels of the separation between Lionsgate and Stars, it seems Lionsgate is charging ahead with its planned reforms with a second sale. Even after their first separate quarterly results have failed to impress Wall Street much on either side of the split. Blake & Wang P.A. the entertainment attorney Los Angeles, Brandon Blake, tells us what is known so far about the sale.

Brandon Blake

Niche to Regional

This time, it seems that Lionsgate is trying to shift its image from a niche, Hollywood-focused service for the Indian market to a broader, regional focus. As part of this shift, Lionsgate Play has been sold, ironically, back to its founder, Rohit Jain.

Under the deal, for which full financial information has not yet been released, the company will be returned to Jain under full ownership and management, with Lionsgate exiting entirely. The name will be licensed to the streamer, however, and they will continue to circulate their new films and TV offerings through the Asian platform.

Jain, the streamer’s founder in many ways, both built and scaled the streamer for the Asian market over 8 years during his tenure as president of Lionsgate Play Asia. He first joined Lionsgate in 2018, specifically for the Mumbai office, and the service was first set up as a joint partnership between Lionsgate India and Starz. However, as Lionsgate seeks to move away from its current image as a “niche” Hollywood service to a broader appeal, it seems they’re no longer keen on sustaining the streamer in-house.

New Phase of Growth

There’s no doubt that Jain managed to grow the streamer for its South Asian and Southeast Asian markets, and today, Lionsgate Play has taken on its own distinctive branding and space in what has turned into a very fast-growing market for digital entertainment. A continuity and depth of experience the streamer will no doubt benefit from, as it takes its first independent steps away from Lionsgate proper.

He was also responsible for much of Starz’s growth in the Indian and Asian markets. Starz, of course, has also now been spun off from Lionsgate as its parent company, now trading independently on the NASDAQ index under the ticker STRZ. Ironically, when the first full quarter results as independent businesses were released, Starz appears to have put in a better financial performance than Lionsgate, although that was likely only post-split teething troubles for the well-respected Lionsgate brand.

Lionsgate has been undergoing a major shift in its operations, focusing on “pure-play” as a strategy rather than further pursuing streaming. It is currently putting its massive library of titles to work, hoping to expand the power of its considerable franchise IP, including Saw, John Wick, and the Hunger Games movies. However, they have been struggling with poorer financial performance under the weight of pretty high debt volumes, and cost-cutting has been part of the shift.

We’ve seen the “content supplier” strategy work out very well indeed for Sony. Will this be the focus Lionsgate needs to return it to prominence in what is proving to be a very crowded entertainment market? We shall have to wait and see.