Lionsgate (Creator)

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"Lionsgate? I clearly requested a zebradoor. What am I gonna do with a lionsgate?"

Lionsgate Films (originally stylized as Lions Gate Films prior to 2005) is a Canadian-founded, American-domiciled entertainment company. This company is well-known for producing the Saw, Hostel and The Hunger Games series. Also produced movies such as The Forbidden Kingdom, The Spirit, American Psycho, the Cube series, Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore,The Final and La La Land.

Lions Gate was originally founded in Vancouver from the ashes of defunct Canadian distributor Cinepix Film Properties by investor Frank Giustra, who named the company after the Lions Gate Bridge. In 2000, the studio acquired Trimark Pictures (formerly Vidmark). It expanded by 2004, acquiring Artisan Entertainment ^note and with it the libraries of Vestron Video and the home video rights to the Carolco Pictures library. After pulling their contracts from Showtime in 2009, Lionsgate, MGM and Paramount formed ePix, a premium network that's smaller in scale than its competition.

The company had financial issues due to a number of flops and a few hostile takeover attempts by famed corporate raider Carl Icahn (who has a history of buying floundering businesses and making things worse than before). Icahn dumped his one-third stake in Lionsgate in August, 2011 for $7 a share, a significant haircut after what turned out to be the roaring success of The Hunger Games, which has the makings of a Cash Cow Franchise with as many as three sequels coming in the next five years. In January 2012, Lionsgate acquired Summit Entertainment, the studio behind the Twilight film franchise, for $412.5 million.

2016 saw them acquiring rival premium TV network Starz, and their boatload of networks and properties (including Anchor Bay Entertainment and the back catalog of Film Roman), from John Malone for $4.4 billion. Lionsgate would ultimately sell their stake in Epix to MGM, who would assume full ownership of the network after also buying Viacom's stake. Lionsgate's pay TV rights are tangled up: they own Starz, but Lionsgate itself still licensed its first-run films to Epix through their 2019 slate; they then began outputting content through Hulu from 2020-2021, before finally uniting with their new corporate sibling beginning with their 2022 films.^note