Lionsgate Entertainment
Established: July 11, 1993
Headquarters:
- Lions Gate Studios, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
- Studio Powerstation, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Employees: 66,800 (worldwide)
Industries: Movie and television production, video game production, music production, media distribution, movie theatre operations
Divisions:
- Lionsgate Films (movie production in Canada and the United States)
-- Summit Entertainment (subsidiary)
-- Relativity Media (subsidiary)
-- Challenger Entertainment (subsidiary)
-- Bad Hat Harry Productions (subsidiary)
- Globalgate Entertainment (Global distribution of Lionsgate movies and television shows to partners)
- Lionsgate Commonwealth (movie production in United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa)
- Lionsgate Asia (movie production in Japan, Korea, the Phillippines, Taiwan and Hong Kong)
-- Celestial Tiger Entertainment (50%)
- Lionsgate India (movie production in India)
- Lionsgate Interactive Media (video game production)
-- Lost Ones Studios
-- Black Box Entertainment
-- Camerica
- Lionsgate Television (TV production)
- Starz Network
- Empire Theatres (movie theatres and restaurants)
-- Playdium Destinations
- Lionsgate Music Studios (music production and distribution)
-- OVO Sound (25%)
- Studio Powerstation (movie production studio) (50%)
One of the largest up-and-coming movie producers in the world and one of Canada's powerful "Big Three" film studios (with MGM Studios and Northern Lights Entertainment), Lionsgate is an example of a media company that took every opportunity that came their way, managing to build an empire through investment and re-investment of a vast number of properties and assets who value swelled rapidly over time, with the company posting out very few dividends to shareholders, preferring to grow the value of the assets through the continued investment into the firm's incoming projects. This was once upon a time a risky tactic, but the Canadian movie production boom of the 2000s made it rather less so, particularly through the company's half-ownership of Toronto's giant Studio Powerstation complex, which gave them access to both palatial complexes for filming and access to the vast community of those who make movies and television shows in Toronto.
Created by movie industry veterans Frank Giustra, Kendrick Blackhorse and Avi Federgreen in 1993, Lionsgate's history began through smaller productions and shows primarily aimed at television networks in Canada, the United States and Britain, but the company's constant pushes for growth and aggressive asset chasing, while getting the company into a sizable quantity of debt issues early on, ended up being hugely beneficial later on. By 2000, though, the company had gained enthusiastic new investors in Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Canadian investors Samantha Westland, David Neikan and Johnathan Welland, providing the company with access to hundreds of millions of dollars in additional capital, and enabling the half-share in the newly-completed Studio Powerstation in 2001 and a share in the under-construction MetroNome music center in 2003.
By the time Lionsgate was the producer of the Academy Award-winning Crash in 2004, the company was well-established in the movie business, but was hardly considered a major player. After Crash, that changed, with a stack of releases in the 2000s that were successes that established the firm's name in the public's consciousness. After the 2008 acquisition of Summit Entertainment, the company's entry into several lucrative fields, starting with teen novel-based series Twilight in 2008, superhero movies Kick-Ass in 2009 and Captain America: The First Avenger in 2011 (both in partnership with Marvel Studios) made the firm well-known, before The Hunger Games's debut in 2012 made them massive players.
The Twilight series, often panned by critics, did make massive profits for the company, but the The Hunger Games series blew that out of the water by an order of magnitude and made the firm better than two and a half billion dollars in profits, which was promptly shoveled back into many different other projects, particularly in new movies - Now You See Me, Sicario, Brooklyn, Ender's Game, John Wick, Interstellar, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Gone Girl, Machinima, Point Break, La La Land - and expanding into the television business, and then the music business, the latter being a once-unusual move where the company became a shareholder in Toronto rapper Drake's OVO Sound through simply giving him access to the firm's massive distribution networks. (Drake would later be part of Lionsgate's board of directors.) The company's growth shifted them into the music and television world in a big way, and the merger with Starz Inc. (which made Starz boss John Malone a Lionsgate director) expanded their television holdings dramatically.
All the while, Lionsgate kept up both its heady expansions, chasing of new projects and advancement of social causes championed by many of its founders and board members. Perhaps the highest profile of these was the proud backing of female video game developers Brianna Wu, Amanda Warner, Kylie Reiland and Anita Sarkeesian after the mess that became known as GamerGate, and Lionsgate director Samantha Westland provided her funding for the launch of her game studio, Lost Ones Studios, which became a part of the Lionsgate empire in 2018. The company was a proud supporter of LGBT rights around the world and got involved in a number of films and television shows on the project, usually bringing far more attention to them than would otherwise have been the case, and the company was only too happy to provide for support for projects others had passed up on.
But easily the biggest score of all was in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein cases, where the famed movie producer and founder of the Miramax and The Weinstein Company studios was innundated by sexual assault cases. A frequent partner of Weinstein, Lionsgate found themselves under immense fire for aiding and abetting his behaviour (though this was never proven, it stuck in a sizable way). The company accepted the criticism and figured out a way of doing better - after the Weinstein company collapsed in 2016, Lionsgate bought the firm's assets at court, merging them into a new subsidiary, Challenger Entertainment, and offered 66% ownership of the company to the victims of Weinstein's actions, a headline-making move that made many of those who accepted millions and, for two of the most high-profile women involved (Cate Blanchett and Sarah Polley), directors at Lionsgate. The move, which estimates said could cost Lionsgate as much as $250 million of its investment in the company, ended up being one of the biggest long-term PR coups of the decade, as the company in the later stages of the 2010s was able to secure numerous lucrative deals in large part due to its handling of the situation and its massive moves. The company also publicly stated that it would avoid gender gaps in pay for its employees, a promise that more than a few in the industry were only too happy to make sure the big company stuck to. (It did.)
By 2019, Lionsgate was being considered to be among the 'Major' studios with vast assets and global footprint, and an estimated workforce of nearly 67,000 worldwide. The company's operations in modern times are primarily run from the fourteen-story Lionsgate Block at Studio Powerstation.