Comcast’s potential $3 billion plus acquisition of DreamWorks Animation SKG isn’t about movies, or even animation, but more about creating further film and TV synergies at NBCUniversal and expanding Comcast’s consumer products and theme-park businesses, which includes Universal Studios, reports the Wall Street Journal.
While DreamWorks is famous for producing Shrek and How to Train Your Dragon, it’s also built a small but growing television business over the past few years, creating such properties as a reboot of Voltron for Netflix.
How to Train Your Dragon already has been spun off into a TV show, which premiered as Dragons: Riders of Berk on Cartoon Network in fall 2012 and then came back for a second season as Dragons: Defenders of Berk. The show’s third season, Dragons: Race to the Edge, moved to Netflix last June. The third and final movie of the franchise is expected to come out in 2018.
Ideally, the WSJ reports, Comcast would like to take a page from Disney’s playbook, which has acquired Marvel and Lucasfilm and is working with those companies to create extended franchises for film and television, such as The Avengers and Star Wars, worth billions. Disney and Marvel have created multiple television series out of the Marvel universe, including such shows as ABC’s Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter and Netflix’s Jessica Jones and Daredevil and the upcoming Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Defenders. Marvel also is producing Cloak and Dagger for Disney-owned Freeform in 2017.
NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke comes from Disney, and during his tenure at Comcast, the company has more than doubled its investment in theme parks and expanded its consumer-products business more than threefold to more than $100 million in revenue in 2015.
Comcast, via Universal, owns film franchises such as The Fast and the Furious and Pitch Perfect that it’s interested in expanding into TV properties.
Comcast also owns its own film animation company, Illumination, which has had hits with Despicable Me and spin-off Minions. DreamWorks Animation would be kept separate from Illumination, says the Journal.
Since the company tried—and was denied for regulatory reasons—to buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion, it has been relatively quiet on the acquisition front, although it has taken stakes in digital players BuzzFeed and Vox Media.
Should Comcast complete the deal, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, 65, is expected to exit the company he’s been a part of since its founding in 1994. Katzenberg has run DreamWorks since 2004.
READ MORE: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times
[Image courtesy of The New York Times]
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