Breakingviews: Hollywood’s latest siren call comes from Brad Pitt

Starstruck overseas investors can’t quit Hollywood. The freshest example is French film and television studio Mediawan buying a significant stake in actor Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B Entertainment. Many previous attempts to plant foreign flags in Hollywood have gone awry, but there’s a chance the company behind the hit series “Call My Agent!” has drafted a better script.

Mediawan was founded in 2015 by producer Pierre-Antoine Capton, telecom magnate Xavier Niel and former Lazard dealmaker Matthieu Pigasse. Backed by private equity firm KKR, the company has focused largely on Europe and acquired dozens of production companies, including Lagardère Studios and a unit of renowned director Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp.

Its latest deal values 21-year-old Plan B at around $300 million, according to the Financial Times. Pitt’s award-winning catalog includes “Moonlight” and “Eat Pray Love.” The firm’s industry connections are strong, too. Warner Bros Discovery gets first dibs on its movies while Amazon.com’s Prime Video has first-look rights for TV series.

It’s easy to see how Plan B suits Mediawan’s expansion plans. Netflix, Apple and Amazon are hungry for exclusive programming as entertainment giants such as Walt Disney increasingly hoard productions for their own competing video streaming services. Pitt is also following a similar playbook as fellow actor Reese Witherspoon, who sold her production company Hello Sunshine to Blackstone-backed Candle Media last year for nearly $1 billion.

Even so, Hollywood is littered with unhappy endings for international interlopers. Japan’s Sony overpaid for Columbia Pictures, which was partly owned by Coca-Cola, in 1989 and later wrote down the $3.4 billion investment. China’s Dalian Wanda last year was seeking to unload Legendary Entertainment, according to Bloomberg, after buying it in 2016 for $3.5 billion. The acquisition of Seagram’s Universal Studio by France’s Vivendi, under Jean-Marie Messier, led to a humiliating retreat.

Although Pitt is a marquee name, the Plan B deal looks relatively small in the context of Mediawan’s holdings. The French group also is touting that it will leave the firm with full editorial and creative control as it seeks to open doors for it in Europe. The sharper strategy promises to be more like the storyline in Pitt’s “Moneyball” than the bearish perspective of “The Big Short.”

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