Reports Of Sony Courtship Of IMAX Drives Stock Price Spike

COMMENTS (10)

• Can’t happen without a major shift in anti-trust policy.

  Comment by mfan — Friday December 31, 2010 @ 12:55pm PST  Reply to this post

• What mfan said – the studios are barred by law from owning theater chains, and have been for over half a century. (Apparently the Daily Mail, being a UK publication, isn’t aware of this.)

  Comment by John Whorfin — Friday December 31, 2010 @ 2:18pm PST  Reply to this post

• While the studios can’t, their parent companies can. Hence Sony & Universal owned Loew’s (pre-bankruptcy); Viacom – Famous Players; Warner & Viacom – Mann

  Comment by not quite right — Friday December 31, 2010 @ 5:17pm PST  Reply to this post

• Just a quick heads up to everyone outside the UK. For all intents and purposes the Daily Mail is a cross between the National Inquirer and Fox News. Not a solid source of any news let alone business news.

  The only way I can see this being remotely possible is if Sony want to leverage the IMAX brand and start using it in their TVs. I can totally see Sony producing a range of high end, big screen hi-def televisions that are supposedly built with ‘IMAX technology’. It’s a stretch but not impossible.

  Besides, this whole thing is academic. Once Howard Stringer is drop kicked out of the door at Sony expect his successor to sell off all Sony’s media assets and focus on producing electronics again.

  In fact, if/when Sony sell off Columbia and it’s labels I could see them retain Sony Imageworks, Sony Pictures Animation and (providing this nonsense report is true) IMAX as they could fit in with a ‘leaner, meaner’ Sony that’s focused on electronics again.

  Comment by Warner Borg — Friday December 31, 2010 @ 8:49pm PST  Reply to this post

• Yup. ‘not quite right’ is right.

  Comment by Ronald Miller — Friday December 31, 2010 @ 9:24pm PST  Reply to this post

• Hi,

  The DM opinion isn’t fair, esp. when it comes to its business coverage.

  Secondly, everyone’s saying that media will be sold off once Sir Stringer retires, but they don’t then seem able to join the dots of the most profitable division and likely successor executives, of Playstion. Which has been 30 years in the making and who’ve been following the subsequent lessons learnt at the cost of Betamax’s loss, the strategy which the original Playstation launched under, worked for Bluray, or the recent sector-wide content/revenue deals for internet-connected Televisions.

  Yours kindly/Happy New Year,

  Shakir Razak

  Comment by Shakir razak — Saturday January 1, 2011 @ 6:49am PST  Reply to this post

• Sumner Redstone’s company National Amusements owns a large chain of movie theaters, and also owns Viacom/Paramount, so there should be no problem in Sony owning both Columbia and IMAX.

  Comment by what about redstone — Saturday January 1, 2011 @ 11:48am PST  Reply to this post

• warner borg is not thinking straight. when sony bought columbia, the story was that it didn’t want a recurrence of betamax. the ownership of sony pictures achieved exactly that goal with blu-ray. they’re not selling the entertainment assets.
  but then warner borg works for warners don’t you and a little disinformation is good for business on that side of the hill, isn’t it?

  Comment by skeptic — Saturday January 1, 2011 @ 3:46pm PST  Reply to this post

  • Actually skeptic I do not work for Warner Bros. My name comes from an article around the time WB absorbed New LIne and were pointing their steel talons in the direction of MGM.

    I thought it was a really fitting play on words. Especially since Time Warner are still sitting on a war chest of over $7 billion (?) and 2011 could see Bewkes ‘splashing that cash’. If the price is right of course. Resistance is futile?

    My ‘issue’ with Sony’s film and TV division isn’t that they are superfluous but that they aren’t what Sony needs at the moment. I can see the benefit of Sony having a NBC-Universal type company with a portfolio of great cable channels, but the foreign media ownership laws means their hands are tied in that regard.

    Sony’s media operation isn’t bad, it just seems out of step with their needs. How many shows do Sony have on prime time network television at the moment, two? I know they’ve had great success in the ‘cable space’ but starting the season with just Community (which I adore) and Rules of Engagement feels a little anemic.

    I know Sony Pictures TV is investing heavily in prime time development for this coming season but they’ve done that in the past with mixed results. Does the world need yet another reboot of Charlie’s Angels?

    I have to ask, in this new digital media landscape of Internet enabled TVs and VOD what does it benefit Sony to have a film studio that lies FIFTH in market share when they are being beaten soundly in the home TV market by Samsung?

    I don’t want to sound like I’m beating the drum for Sony to burn Columbia etc to the ground, but Sony has become far too bloated and sprawling a company over the years and could do with some ‘pruning’.

    Whether they actually do it or not is another question entirely.

    Comment by Warner Borg — Saturday January 1, 2011 @ 7:05pm PST  Reply to this post

• Is it the Sony parent corporation or the film division that wants to buy all of this IMAX stock? I could see the Sony Electronics division being VERY interested in buying up IMAX and forcing them to replace all of the Christie 2K projectors that make up the IMAX digital projection systems with Sony 4Ks.

  Comment by GSmith — Monday January 3, 2011 @ 12:27am PST  Reply to this post