Deal could value Love Is Blind US group at $500m (£372m)
Mediawan is looking to follow up last year’s eye-catching acquisition of See-Saw Films with a deal for Peter Chernin’s The North Road Company.
The latter is valued at around $500m and would become the largest deal to date for Mediawan, which was founded by Xavier Niel, Matthieu Pigasse and Pierre-Antoine Capton in 2015.
The company, which is backed by US private equity firms KKR and Atwater Capital, is already owner of Brad Pitt’s Plan B and UK-based Drama Republic, while it revealed a joint venture with Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap - led by Mona Qureshi and Tanya Qureshi - late last year.
The talks are at an advanced stage, according to Bloomberg which broke the news, and would be part of a stratgey to create a global production group with scale.
North Road houses labels incuding Chernin Entertainment, Turkey’s Karga Seven and Mexican outfit Perro Azul, as well as Love Is Blind outfit Kinetic Content and Words + Pictures from the Chernin side.
The latter duo were picked up from Germany’s Red Arrow Studios in 2022 to help launch North Road, after All3Media dropped an attempt to buy them.
Mediawan is behind shows such as The Counte of Monte Cristo and Call My Agent, and owns more than 80 production companies across 14 countries.
They include Palomar and Our Films in Italy, Leonine Studios in Germany, Boomerang and Good Mood in Spain, Submarine in the Netherlands, and Chapter 2 and Chi-Fou-Mi in France.
The company restructured its distribution operations last year after combining with Leonine Studios, as revealed by Broadcast International.
It subsequently hired former All3Media Americas chief Sally Habbershaw to lead the combined entity, which has north of 30,000 hours in its library.
A deal could be wrapped in the coming weeks, sources suggest, with the consolidation coming just a week after news of a potential merger between All3Media and Banijay, reflecting production and distribution group’s attempts to scale up in a bid to better compete.
Broadcast International has contacted Mediawan and North Road for comment.
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