Bringing us one step closer to a world where our fan-fic “John Wick Kills Godzilla, And Also Maybe That Big Worm From Dune” might finally come true, Variety reports that giant media company Legendary Entertainment is considering an opportunity to devour fellow somewhat-giant movie studio Lionsgate Films, feasting on the rich IP marrow buried within. News of the possible acquisition comes just months after Starz (which was formerly called Lionsgate, because corporate overlords do not care about our efforts to maintain readability) spun off Lionsgate Films (along with all the other movie and TV-making entities they owned) into its own corporate entity.
Both studios exist slightly off to the side of the major Hollywood studios. Lionsgate (which got its start as Canadian-American studio Cinépix back in the 1960s, before being bought by Lionsgate—the company, which is now Starz, we’re sorry—back in 1997) is usually referred to as a “mini-major,” which means it does its own film production and distribution, and tries to compete directly with the bigger dogs. Legendary, meanwhile, was cooked up by Wall Street types back in 2000, and has existed in a sort of weird symbiosis with the major studios, creating multi-year deals where Warner Bros., Universal, or Sony would distribute, co-own, and profit from the movies Legendary was getting made. (It also, meanwhile, just got out of a more complicated ownership situation, having been part of massive Chinese company Wanda Group from 2016 to 2024.)
The upshot is that these are both studios operating at roughly the same tier, and each with a handful of franchises that they cling to fiercely in order to keep money rolling in. (Legendary has the Monsterverse and Dune stuff, both of which it shares custody of with Warner Bros., while Lionsgate has made big money off of the John Wick films and its massively successful Hunger Games adaptations.) Variety notes that the major studios have been a little leery to scoop up Lionsgate for itself—despite such an acquisition being the whole reason Starz spun it off—because the studio doesn’t typically retain international rights to its movies, selling them off to studios in other countries. But that same trait might make it a better fit for Legendary, which has built its whole business model off of partial ownership.
Most important, meanwhile, is the fact that, if this merger—still only in exploratory phases, to be clear, and which, if it goes anywhere, will probably start with some low-risk co-productions—goes through, we will no longer have to spend like 10 minutes a week reminding ourselves which “smaller studio whose name starts with an L” owns which big movie franchise, which should be a big win for us.
