Lionsgate has acquired eOne’s TV and film operations from Hasbro for $500 million. In a time where big acquisitions are all the more commonplace, the news still provides an opportunity to examine what Lionsgate is getting for its money and how it could be fit to use it. Show Tracker reveals the number of commissions to come out of eOne from the 2016/17 season onwards.
The 2016/17 season served as one of eOne’s biggest as a distributor, seeing three new commissions, two for ABC and one for TNT, come from the distributor. Designated Survivor was quickly sold around the world to Netflix, branding the series as Netflix Original, before eventually renewing the show for a third and final season after ABC cancelled the show.
More successful for both eOne and ABC was The Rookie which has stayed strong for five seasons, with its sixth halted mid-production due to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, while also spawning a spinoff The Rookie: Feds, also debuting on ABC.
eOne is more than just a distributor, containing an impressive production house of its own. The company has produced several acclaimed series surely to be the envy of its distribution arm like Run and Sharp Objects (both distributed by Warner) as well as the Emmy nominated Yellowjackets (distributed by Paramount). Alongside the scripted TV benefit comes of course eOne’s film operations, which has helped produce several successful movies over the years, including two this year that utilised the IP of its current parent Hasbro - Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts - sadly for Lionsgate those major IPs will be staying with Hasbro. Even without this IP Lionsgate is still set to boost its slate of releases, which 3Vision’s Movie Tracker reveals are typically granted a healthy transactional window for each title before licensing them out to other services.
Focusing back on its scripted TV distribution activity, eOne has continued to branch out past US network commissions, with its sales team taking the likes of ‘Upright’ (a co-production between Australia’s Foxtel and the UK’s Sky) around the world, with a new season premiering last November.
Analysing eOne’s more recent international sales activity (2018/19 season onwards) quickly reveals some of its top buyers, such as Amazon who took Cruel Summer in eleven Show Tracker markets along with ‘The Rookie’ in India, as well as NBCUniversal which has seen its Sky channels become a quick home for both The Rookie and The Rookie: Feds.
There has been no history of Lionsgate+ (or during its time as StarzPlay) acquiring eOne series in the first or second window, with eOne enjoying its soon-to-be-lost position as one of the few distributors of US scripted content without a D2C service of its own. For this reason, many local buyers have had the opportunity to acquire the many TV series in its catalogue, with broadcast services particularly keen to capitalise on acquiring the procedural dramas available to them.
Lionsgate itself has swung back and forth on its engagement with vertical integration the past few seasons, refusing to go all-in such as the likes of Disney have, with much of the activity steered by whether the title under their distribution is a Starz commission.
Just as Lionsgate is more likely to licence non-Starz commissions to third parties so too is it unlikely to steer its newly acquired eOne content pipeline directly into Lionsgate+. The addition of eOne can help strengthen their production capabilities while also broadening their distribution library into one that is extremely enticing to international services increasingly desperate to acquire US content.
While the deal is not set to close until the end of the year, Lionsgate’s balanced approach to content distribution, which is not wholly reliant on vertical integration, aligns well with the ongoing strategy deployed by eOne’s scripted distribution team. eOne in this instance will be able to slot neatly into Lionsgate’s future plans to bring in sales revenue, while also supporting their services.
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