UPDATE: Icahn Ups Lionsgate Stake; Stock In Freefall After Lousy Quarter

COMMENTS (23)

• … by all means, SAG, keep messing around. Pretty soon no one will be left to hire your members.

  Comment by Uh huh — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 11:50am PST  Reply to this post

• wow that sucks…another buyer down the tubes. Everyday this is becoming less and less funny to me. At times it really does feel like the sky is falling. No one is doing well…at all!!!

  Comment by Alboone — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 11:58am PST  Reply to this post

• Transporter 3, Punisher, and The Spirit, see a pattern? Badly reviewed films and no horror titles.

  Comment by Mr K — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 12:00pm PST  Reply to this post

• LGF loss John Hagoman, a very good marketer and then they loss their horror guy, I think.

  They are so quick to get out of being a quirky little place and you see what that gets you: bullshit comicbook films that cost a mint and return nothing. Any high school freshman could have told LGF that “The Spirit” died with Eisner and the “Punisher” has no fanboy appeal.

  time to clean house and get rid of the yes men and ass kissers and get innovators back in there.

  Or you know, merge with Summit.

  Comment by Anonymous — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 12:12pm PST  Reply to this post

• They need to go back to their bread and butter. Horror and thrillers. Forget movies like “New in Town”, they don’t the have the marketing machine in place to push a movie like that.

  Comment by LA writer — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 1:13pm PST  Reply to this post

• Hmm. Maybe they wouldn’t be in the shitter if they stuck to doing what they do best (horror) instead of churning out more and more shit “starring” the likes of Jason Statham and Tyler Perry.

  Comment by Mahogany — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 1:34pm PST  Reply to this post

• I guess the plan to buy up Summit has been put on hold.

  As for Lionsgate, they got so wrapped up in making themselves into a major player they shot themselves in the foot. The films they put out were too pricey, and lacked the critical/audience buzz to pull ahead, all the while forgetting their bread and butter of low budget horror films.

  Sometimes being a major isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially when you carved a profitable niche for yourself.

  Comment by Furious D — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 1:43pm PST  Reply to this post

• Perhaps it’s time for Lionsgate to hire a real marketer. Tim Palen is a waste of human life and couldn’t market his way out of the closet (no pun intended). They need some brains in there. Oh, and perhaps some better choice of films. Isn’t the world over the crap they’ve been spewing for the past couple of years?

  Comment by Mike McCord — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 2:08pm PST  Reply to this post

• Mahogony – Tyler is a clear bright spot on the Lionsgate balance sheet.

  Comment by Very Curious — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 2:14pm PST  Reply to this post

• Wonder if this news will scuttle the planned purchase of TV Guide channel… I wonder why that’s not mentioned in any of the reports?

  Comment by Anonymous — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 2:45pm PST  Reply to this post

• You think this explains why Tom Ortenberg was let go?

  Dumping a bad film like Punisher into early December only made things worse. Then they took a weak film like The Spirit and tried to go against major Christmas releases. These were mistakes a rookie would make not someone with more than 20 years experience. The Transporter series is tired and Jason Statham is a legend in his own mind. Either these were very bad decisions from TO or Joe Drake’s been calling all of the shots.

  Even making the Spirit was a mistake using Frank Miller. He didn’t just drain all of the color out of the film he also drained the humanity. The amazing thing about the Spirit was the way common people’s stories were told with the Spirit as a Deux Machina bystander. By bringing the Spirit character to the fore ground the absurdity of his persona became front and center and ridiculous. The original stories had an Upton Sinclair perspective that exposed crime and corruption as modern fables showing how this effected normal people’s lives. The FM version was just trivial crap. The color palette was also a mistake as Will Eisner’s colors were the essence of “adventure in 4 colors”, and the reason that the comic book award is named in his honor.

  Lionsgate needs to make some quality films at reasonable budgets. They have been coasting for years on their Torture Porn, Tyler Perry and hand-offs from the Weinsteins. It’s getting to a point where the Lionsgate name is becoming a joke like the old Hollywood Pictures remember “if you see the Sphinx it probably stinks.”

  Their marginalization of Roadside Attractions is another bad sign. They take a good film like Religilous and try to broaden it to commercial theatres instead of playing art theatres which turned a solid hit into a near miss. So Roadside becomes Roadkill playing off Lionsgate’s misfires while the parent company takes any film that might have a chance to be successful for them.

  Comment by Fedupwith BS — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 2:51pm PST  Reply to this post

• get rid of shearmur and drake. go back to what was working from 2001-2006.

  Comment by enough — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 3:43pm PST  Reply to this post

• Mike McCord, I think you’re right. Their marketing department is useless.
  I read a couple of Punisher reviews and even critics who hated the movie (Variety, Ebert) predicted this would win the weekend and would make a lot of money. LG messed it up by having their own Transporter 3 compete with Punisher and they couldn’t even get the message out to the target audience that these films are in theaters.
  I can’t believe feltheimer still runs this place, but maybe this was Carl Icahn’s plan all along.

  Comment by Agreed — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 3:57pm PST  Reply to this post

• Hey, Feltheimer

  Read the posts above from “LA Writer” and “Mahogany.” Then do yourself a favor and DO WHAT THEY SAY!!

  Comment by Horror Fan — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 5:04pm PST  Reply to this post

• Buying TV Guide Channel was also a “brilliant” (aka stupid) move.

  Comment by Bob — Tuesday February 10, 2009 @ 8:17pm PST  Reply to this post

• Tyler Perry has been printing money for them. He isn’t the problem. I think they tried to grow too fast and got away from what they do best.

  Comment by writer — Wednesday February 11, 2009 @ 2:02am PST  Reply to this post

• Icahn is a pathetic fossil who becomes more irrelevant with each passing year. He’s done neither himself nor Yahoo! any favors since he took his stake, lost a bundle on Blockbuster, and completely embarassed himself trying to change management at TimeWarner. No one at Lionsgate need fear Icahn. His track record is littered with failures, and in a bear market his outdated tactics simply do not work.

  Comment by bored2tears — Wednesday February 11, 2009 @ 3:33am PST  Reply to this post

• Very Curious, Tyler Perry’s not a bright spot when he runs off with most of the profits. Spielberg’s the same. All the movie profits in the world don’t matter to a studio if the studio doesn’t actually get to keep most of it.

  Hence Lions Gate is in the toilet.

  And that’s why Paramount kicked Cruise’s ass to the curb a couple of years ago. He ran off with most of the profits too.

  Comment by Mahogany — Wednesday February 11, 2009 @ 7:39am PST  Reply to this post

• Gee… nobody saw this coming…

  I kid, of course.

  Several months ago there were a lot of horror journalists that suggested Lionsgate should learn from the object lesson of New Line Cinema, an empire built on horror and “B” movie titles; the “House That Freddy Built” as it was called. It was only when Bob Shaye, et al sought “legitimacy” that things started to go south. They strayed away from their bread and butter and ended up starving themselves into oblivion. Yes, they made the hugely successful LORD OF THE RINGS films, but beyond that… there wasn’t much success.

  Lionsgate’s foundation has been in horror, and picking up cult classic horror titles and giving them proper DVD releases. Since LGF has started on the path to “legitimacy”, their home market sales have declined (since they haven’t been releasing many horror titles) and their box office revenues have fallen. The SAW series is tired, they threw MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN under a bus and they haven’t been active in trying to launch any new franchises. MY BLOODY VALENTINE was a bright spot, but in previous years, MY BLOODY VALENTINE would have been one bright spot among many others.

  Now… not so much.

  Take a look at New Line LGF… because that’s where you’re going to end up.

  Legitimacy? Being profitable is legitimacy… this is a business… remember that… make a profit or perish.

  Comment by Raider — Wednesday February 11, 2009 @ 8:11am PST  Reply to this post

• Ditto what was said about Tyler Perry. He’s a Good Thing LGF has going for it; his movies cost what we in LA would call “nothing” and make a few tidy millions.
  With regard to horror, maybe they just got tired of making Saw over and over, and maybe they thought it was played out and not worth the money they were starting to have to spend (I suspect they were right.) I don’t think there’s anything particularly awful with their model: Screen Gems does pretty well with it, though they have some deep-pocketed friends for when it fails. SG also seems to have much more effective marketing.
  So is this a Cannon waiting to happen, or an Orion waiting to happen?

  Comment by jamie — Wednesday February 11, 2009 @ 9:25am PST  Reply to this post

• This is what happens when you let a wanna-be like Frank Miller piss all over a great franchise like THE SPIRIT.
  Miller should stick to comics and Lionsgate should stick to low budget genre films.

  Comment by ReelBusy — Wednesday February 11, 2009 @ 9:35am PST  Reply to this post

• The reason this company and others like it are in such trouble is because they make such BAD movies that Nobody wants to see. Because the business is so locked down fresh ideas aren’t introduced and here we all are living in a world where movies like Spirit, Punisher, Transporter (any movie Jason Statham does is a joke), Paul Blart and other disasters like it are made for millions of dollars.

  Comment by john — Wednesday February 11, 2009 @ 9:39am PST  Reply to this post

• Lionsgate has completely lost its way and the management is not giving their team the latitude to develop, make and acquire the kinds of movies that they need in order to be successful in today’s market, i.e., genre pictures that can be made for a decent price. I was working on something with them that was a natural for the old LG, the one that made money, and they wouldn’t shake out the money to make it happen. They need to refocus and give Paseornek, Sacchi, and that side of the feature business the ability to create product that serves the market. Those guys know how to do that, Allison Shearmur doesn’t.

  Comment by Hammonds — Thursday February 12, 2009 @ 12:11pm PST  Reply to this post