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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Saturday, July 24th, 2010 - Comments Off on Ryan Kavanaugh Was Already A "Real" Mogul Before Overture
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Ryan Kavanaugh Was Already A "Real" Mogul Before Overture

Here is what you were being asked to buy on a Friday afternoon…
For $10 million or so (as alleged by The Wrap), Ryan Kavanaugh has purchased a walking-dead entity that released 16 movies in 4 years of business, and this now makes him a “real” studio mogul.
Can’t we see what’s in front of our faces? Relativity is a producer on over 20 films this year. This year alone they have made more movies than Overture made in its entire 4-year run. Ryan Kavanaugh was already a much bigger mogul than the Overturians… and has his personal fingers in more films than anyone in town.
Can he sustain? Is it a house of cards? What’s the long play? All reasonable questions that I still find myself asking.
But while guys like Patrick Goldstein are trying to make it sound like he uses a Ouija board to pick his movies based on something he read in a magazine, Kavanaugh has told me, rather directly, that his Ouija board is really a strong foreign sales position in which he claims 70% of the funding on every movie he now makes is guaranteed by pre-sales in 103 countries. Not very new fangled.
Ask me about the Overture sale and I will tell you this… Kavanaugh hired some talent and got them and some product at a bargain basement price. These players may or may not stick with Relativity. Relativity may or may not end up being an ongoing theatrical distributor. But he was the lead player here, not the guy somehow lucking his way up the ladder.
And ironically, if the three movies Starz now has release rights to include the pay-tv rights – which I assume they must – then Relativity can more than pay for the “acquisition” from the NetFlix rights alone.
In other words, Starz seems to have, basically, paid Relativity to take Overture and its ongoing employment contracts and responsibilities for releasing these three movies as in a baseball trade… Starz may have gotten some cash, but Relativity got a lot more in value than what it paid, but it also takes on some responsibilities.
As someone unnamed former Overturer told The Wrap, “The company’s not being sold, it’s being wound down.”
Yeah. Pretty much.
And what a nice story it will be if the Overture team does great things for Relativity and they live happily ever after. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There is no assurance at all of either group being fully committed to the other.
But somehow, because the press release said, in graph 4 of its press release, “

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I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

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