All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks. All right, I'm kicking it off. Please note that important disclosures appear as a handout available in the registration area and on the Morgan Stanley public website. With that, I'm Thomas Yeh, Media Research Analyst at Morgan Stanley, and I have the distinct pleasure of welcoming Michael Burns, Vice Chairman of Lionsgate, and Jeff Hirsch, CEO of Starz. Thanks so much, both, for coming back.
Thanks, Rob.
Yes.
Appreciate you being here. It's been pretty busy at Lionsgate. I think there's been a couple of transactions: the recent eOne acquisition, the 3 Arts transaction, and of course, now the planned launch of the Lionsgate Studios. Can you help set the stage with what you're hoping to achieve this year with the SPAC in particular, and maybe what are the key highlights and priorities that you're hoping to get through?
It's funny because SPAC was a hot term, and then it became a dirty word and now here we go again. We really look at this as a sub-IPO disguised as a SPAC. We're in business with some old friends, Harry Sloan and Eli Baker and Sagansky. We like this opportunity. We thought this was the cleanest way to set a mark and also a floor for the studio. So the idea is we're gonna we're gonna sell 13%-15% of the studio, so it'll be a pure play stock. The stock symbol will be LION, L-I-O-N, which should go out assuming everything goes according to plan, on the de-SPACing, et cetera, call it in early April, that'll be trading. So RemainCo will have 85%, thereabouts, of the studio and 100% of Mr.
Hirsch's Starz from the get-go. And the plan is to spin off the remaining 85% by the end of the calendar year in 2024.
Okay, that makes sense. I mean, I think the SPAC has certainly taken precedent in terms of timeline over the previously announced separation, but as you just said, it sounds like that's still on track for the calendar year. Can you maybe just explain and talk about that process and if that changes at all due to the SPAC? Or how should we think about the ultimate separation in the end state for that?
Well, full separation, we're targeting to do that in, as I said, in this calendar year.
Yeah.
And I don't see any reason why that shouldn't happen. The idea of raising this $350 million-$400 million is about making sure that when we separate the businesses, that neither side of the business is over-levered. So yes, we spent some money before the year-end. We bought 3 Arts, wrote a $375 million dollar check.
Mm-hmm.
Then, on top of that, we bought 25% more of 3 Arts, which is in the management production business. When we first bought a piece of 3 Arts, that was 51% of it some 5 years ago, it was doing, let's say, a $30 million EBITDA number, and it's doing a lot more than that. We love that business. We like that team. They're terrific producers. So... eOne is a transaction that we frankly just couldn't pass on. It was right in our wheelhouse. Thousands of titles in the movie library, in the television library. We pick up shows like The Recruit, like The Rookie and Yellowjackets. So that was a big reality television unscripted business that we can augment with Craig Piligian and what he's doing on Pilgrim.
So that was right in our wheelhouse, like going way back when to Trimark, to Artisan, to Summit, and so that's gonna be a very accretive transaction for us because we have so many synergies.
I think the original plan was to spin studio out of Starz. Is that still the appropriate way to think about how the separation occurs?
I would say that, yes, what's gonna happen is there's always a tax-efficient way to do that.
Yeah.
We had to retain at least 80% of the studio within the holding company, and we had to spin at least 80%. When you get to that part of the transaction, spin at least 80%, my sense it'll be 85%. And the reason for that, so it's in a tax-efficient manner to our shareholders as well as the parent.
Hmm, makes sense. So I, I wanted to maybe touch on Starz as a standalone asset. Jeff, we've seen some stabilization in the revenues in the recent quarter. Amid a large group of unprofitable to break even streaming services, you, you run a business that's 15% margins. You reiterated an expectation to get that back up to 20% over time. Can you maybe set the stage and talk about what the next phase of Starz looks like, and how we should benchmark success for this year, and how, how we should think about that progress over time?
Yeah. Look, I think we took a much different tact and strategy into streaming. You know, we looked at it as a natural evolution of technology. First, there was cable, then there was satellite, then there was a DSL, now there's IP. And so we didn't look at this as a separate business and go hire a bunch of people, make a specific content for the service. We are kind of distribution agnostic, and so whether it's on Amazon, our own app, Comcast, DirecTV, wherever the consumer wants to watch the business, we're there, right? And so what we've done is we've been able to transition off of the linear business addition of digital to our great linear partners in a way that, you know, by the end of fiscal 2025 will be 70% digital.
Our revenue has been very stable over the last five years. We've just put our first rate increase in the business in the last six months, so revenue is starting to accelerate again. You've seen that increase over the last two quarters. And so we've got a business that's growing revenue, and like you said, it's got a 15% profit margin. Really great return of unlevered free cash flow in terms of about 90% in the steady state business. And I think the next phase as we separate out Lionsgate, you know, I think we've built a very compelling app internally with a great data stack, and so it's, you know, it's a mouse trap that I think most people, if you're struggling in the streaming business, could actually acquire and help fix-...
Some issues you're seeing in the broader space today. But I also think it gives us the opportunity to take and just diversify revenue off of just SVOD into AVOD. And, you know, we're actually actively building an AVOD shelf within the Starz app today, so that we could launch and do some revenue diversification. So I think long term, you've got a business that, you know, is doing 3%-5% revenue growth, doing 20% margins on the bottom, I think it's a good standalone business.
You made some hard decisions last year to restructure the business, including exiting some of the international markets and shifting more towards the domestic business. Even within the domestic business, I think you've kind of aligned more towards the growth opportunities. Do you feel like we've reached a point where now this is where the inflection point happens, and we're kind of poised for growth from here?
Yeah, I think... Look, I think the international was the right thing to do. I think we were very early, and I think it got a little costly, and so we just made the decision to come out. And so, you know, we did make a, I think, mistake there, but we've righted that mistake, and we focused on the domestic business. I think if you look at U.S. and Canada today, there's a real big opportunity. If you look at our two core demos, which are very, very valuable core demos in terms of women and underrepresented audience, very hard to replicate, very great to bundle with these broad-based services. I think as the world moved away from the traditional linear business into the digital business, it's starting to look like the old linear business again.
So I think as these broad-based streaming platforms have stabilized, they figured out who they are, we will start to see bundling in earnest happen. And I think part of the next evolution of subscriber growth, not just for Starz, but for others, is these great bundles that you'll see in the business that ultimately drive a little ARPU down, but lifetime value and churn will come down significantly 'cause you're partnered with folks. And, we're starting to see that today on Verizon, we're bundled with,
Netflix
... with Netflix and on Amazon, with AMC+ and MGM+. And so I think you're gonna start to see more and more of these bigger bundles that will start to replicate the old world based on broader streamers. And that's where I think the next phase of growth will be for Starz.
Interesting. I did wanna ask about that bundling. I mean, you, you've spoken about Starz being a complement service on, on a lot of these partnership models. The great rebundling seems to be happening a little bit more in fits and starts, I think. Sometimes in slow motion, you know, sometimes with confusing partnerships that create more consumer decisions at the margin and feels more fragmented. But what's your world view on the industry health and temperature? Is this picking up momentum, and are you seeing what part of this makes you most excited about the opportunity?
You know, look, we as a, you know, we've always been viewed as kind of that cherry on top of broad-based television. I think as you look at these big, broad-based streamers, they become the number 1 or number 2 SVOD in the home, which is more of a cable replacement than anything else. No one, nobody in the old world picked DirecTV or Starz. They picked DirecTV or Comcast, and they bought Starz on top of both, right? We've actually replicated that in the new world that way, and we think that will happen. We have new distribution partners, whether it's Amazon, whether it's Hulu, these broad-based streamers.
As I think Max starts to realize that they're more than just a channel, they're a platform, I think you'll see, you know, Paramount+ is starting to do that, with Showtime being put in there. My guess is BET will go in next. So I think as these broad-based streamers are starting to stabilize their platforms, start to ingest content, other content in there, you'll start to see Starz flow through there. A lot of the delay, I think, in bundling has been from a technology side, right? Because you have to be able to ingest third-party content, you have to be able to put a billing code against it, and you have to be able to bill it, right? The cable business was really good at doing that.
I think in this, you've got content partners becoming platforms, and you really need to understand that the businesses have really stabilized now. I think that's the next kind of wave that you'll see.
Okay, understood. Michael, I think you and Jimmy have both, on a couple of occasions, mentioned the merits of separation as potentially unlocking increased strategic value on both the studio and the Starz side as standalone assets. I mean, the topic of consolidation in media has only increased in recent months, I feel, but at the same time, it feels like the market seems skeptical that it's a real panacea on the broader industry headwinds. I mean, what do you see as the potential unlock that might happen if any of these assets can move into a larger, vertically integrated company?
Look, we're all dragged along with the media being in an unfavorable place at the moment. But we have a completely different model in the major studios. I was talking to Adam Fogelson this morning, who runs our motion picture business, and we were talking about the overhead in the motion picture business, which is $70 million. And I said, "Adam, I'm just sort of curious, what's the overhead in some of the other majors?" And he said, "5, 6, 7 times that." So, we have a different model. We can't get killed on any one movie because of the licensing that we do internationally. We make money on 75% of our wide releases, and even factoring in the losses, it's a 31% return on that.
Then we have the segment two, the multi-platform releases, which we're making money on 93% of them, and it's a really good business for us. And again, everybody else making less movies, that's good for us from a standpoint of getting screens and putting out those titles. Will there be consolidation? Yes. Why are we doing this? It's pretty simple math. We think that Starz will have its own multiple. It's a very profitable business. Jeff is doing a great job. We suffered our way to wisdom, as the ancient Greeks say, with what we did internationally. We were too early. We spent a lot of money. We pulled back on that, and now we're very focused on the domestic play on the Starz side.
Lionsgate is gonna do more of the same, which we've done in the past. We're sort of returning to our roots. The television business, run by Kevin Beggs and Sandra Stern, is a very, very steady business. The unscripted business, it's gonna be a great business for us in the world where we have now another player, EOne, being consolidated into that. We have the film library, which people don't give us credit for, but that's okay. It'll ultimately be valued. The film library approaching $900 million over the last 12 months. It's a high-margin business, meaning over 50%. It. You can't replace it. It's over 20,000 titles. So how much is it worth? It's worth a lot.
So if you couple the management business, which we really love, on top of the feature film business, the library and the television business, including reality and scripted, what multiple will the standalone studio trade? You're the analyst, you can tell us. But my sense in the past, it's had a low to mid-teen multiple, and then you factor in the scarcity value, and that's without deal chatter, because we're always the consolidation conversation or in the conversation. So my sense is, it'll trade better than it will be coupled with Starz as great of a business as Jeff has. I asked Jeff to come up here, and which is, all right, what's the trade? These guys are in the business of making money.
Well, if you look at the market, the enterprise value of Lionsgate with Starz right now, and you assume that this SPAC transaction, that the LION trade is gonna go through, well, then you're getting Starz for free. $200 million plus of EBITDA on that business, growing, moving towards digital. So Starz is worth a heck of a lot more than zero, and I think it's actually a very valuable asset. So ahead of the transaction closing at the end of March, early April, at the parent company level, you basically get Starz for free, so you get a free option on Starz. Where it will trade ultimately on a full separation, I don't know what multiple it's gonna be. It's gonna be probably 5, 6, 8 times. I don't really know, but again, it controls his own destiny.
It's gonna be a content machine, because going forward, when Jeff separates, all the content that he makes or buys from others or licenses, et cetera, in many cases, he'll have an ownership position in that. So I think that one on one is gonna be a lot more than two, and we think we'll get a better multiple. And I think if you take a look at the asset value that we're building, it makes a lot of sense. Now, you're gonna say to me, "What's gonna happen ultimately?" Well, I don't have a crystal ball, but I do believe that there are very interested opportunities with Starz in the consolidation of the independent channels, et cetera.
I think Lionsgate, with our library and the film business and television business, alone, in a separate company, are gonna be a very interesting strategic alliance partner that's euphemistically put with many other players in the space.
Got it.
I don't think we have an antitrust issue.
I wanna get to the growth drivers at Starz in a minute, but, you did mention the film library at studio, which I think has been a bright spot in financials for some time. 2023, in my mind, was a period of broader industry cost rationalization, which translated into greater austerity on content spending across some of the larger media players. But even then, you delivered profit growth across both film and TV over the same timeframe, and your library sales have remained strong. So can you talk about how discussions with buyers have changed over the last year and a half, and, you know, what's driving that resilience while there's greater focus on spending less?
I think it's the diversification of our library product. It's a... You know, we have a bunch of Quentin Tarantino movies now that were, that are in our library. We have, obviously, the big franchises, the John Wicks of the world and The Hunger Games and the Twilight. And then we have, you know, you talk about, you know, the both sides of the, the, the craziness as far as diversity of our library product. You go from Saw X to The Chosen, which is we have worldwide distribution rights on it. Nobody in this room is gonna know what-- or maybe a few of you. Does anybody know what The Chosen is? The... One. We got one in the back. So The Chosen is, was crowdfunding, it's the story of Jesus. We have, they've been done, I think, six seasons. It's actually out theatrically.
They put out the two or three episodes at a time. So we have worldwide rights of The Chosen. We're gonna go out with that, a worldwide distribution deal, and my sense it'll be a bidding war. So the library itself, and that'll be added to the library. Also, when you have this great IP inside a library, you have the ability to reboot and reimagine those. So I don't know if we said it publicly, but now I'll say it: We're gonna go out with the Twilight series, an animated series. I think there'll be a lot of interest in that. I think we'll take one of our great action franchises starring Keanu Reeves. I think there'll be a television series ultimately on that. We did The Continental.
Jeff was nice enough to green-light that for us, The Continental, which was a three 1.5-hour movies. Ultimately, we kissed him into the deal because he greenlit, greenlit the show, and we ended up making a very relatively short-term deal on that show with Peacock and Amazon. So I feel like the library is gonna be in very good shape this year going forward. The margins are gonna still be over 50-some%, and we're gonna continue to release 10-12 wide releases. Not gonna deviate off of that, and another 30-40 of the multi-platform releases, make money on almost every piece of product that we put out there, and a very similar model in many ways on the television side.
And then if you have a little bit of a hedge for if talent gets more expensive-
Mm-hmm.
You're obviously hedging yourself out on the side of 3 Arts because they represent writers, actors, showrunners, et cetera. So that gives us a good hedge there.
I mean, in a similar vein, I feel like some of your vertically integrated peers have increased their appetite to relicense content in the near term to support their free cash flow. Have you seen that in the market? Has that impacted the broader market price for the content that you're-
I think it's always good when some of the big streamers decide, okay, they're not gonna make it all themselves.
Yeah.
Whether it's in the movie side or the television side, you know, and I'm gonna pick on Ted a little bit, which is, you know, there was a point where they said, "We're not gonna license other people's content," and then cut to, "Look how Suits did." So we've got a bunch of successful television series that we're licensing to Netflix. If you take a look at, I saw that one of your counterpart's points, Rich Greenfield, you know, put up, "Look at Apple TV+. They're now licensing product and other people's product." And so we have a bunch of movies in that package. I was on CNBC a couple weeks ago.
I was on American Airlines, and I was flipping through the movie sections, and I went to All Movies, and 19 of the first 50 movies I looked at were Lionsgate movies. But what's happening is, it's okay with everybody loosening up, because if they decide they're gonna be in the business of licensing movies or television shows, we're obviously a great place to go, because we have recognizable titles that do incredibly well. So, I'm really happy to see it.
Got it. I mean, the topic of library content demand is an interesting one, I think, in the context of movie demand at Starz. That's something that you mentioned, Jeff, on the most recent quarter. It sounded like Pay 2 output was, in particular, a big benefit to subscriber trends. Do you see catalog films playing double duty as churn reducers and potentially even subscriber gross acquisition?
Yeah, I mean, like, the hallmark of premium television has always been great originals, you know, surrounded by Pay One and Pay Two titles. In the quarter we had, you know, John Wick from Lionsgate in the Pay One, and then we had a bunch of Pay Two from Universal. And, you know, we've had, I think, three bad growth quarters in the history of the streaming business in the last seven years. In each of those quarters, we were... I would call them content-barren quarters. We didn't have movies supporting originals, and we had two small originals in each of those quarters. And so, when we have our big tentpole originals coupled with Pay One and Pay Two titles, the business grows, and we see that.
We're excited that we've got Hunger Games coming up in a couple of months from Lionsgate. We've got, you know, 25 of the top 100 box office from last year will be exclusively on Starz next year. We've got great titles coming to the service surrounding our big originals. We premiered BMF this week, and it's off to a monster start. Our tentpole originals coupled, they're really driving the business in a big way, and we couldn't be more thrilled.
I think your original roots come from the movie catalog, right?
Yeah.
Before you really went deep into the originals. How has that market overall changed over the last few years, especially with all these new streaming services kind of on the hunt for content and buying catalogs?
It's interesting. When I think the heyday of a lot of these pays were always coming into the premium services because we were smaller, right? So the idea would be, you could go and monetize, pay against the smaller SVODs or the premium services in the linear days, then go in the second and third window. I think the dollars have gotten so big that some of that has been lost, right? And so you're seeing split windows. You know, Universal has split their first window between Peacock and Amazon. And so I think you'll start to see more of those windows being shared going forward. But we really...
You know, if you think about our two core demos, there's, you know, women, there's underrepresented audiences, and the third leg of the stool is the movie audience, right? And so having a lot of big, fresh titles on the service, coupled with originals, really when they're on and we're in full, then you can see the business just grow like this. And so it's really continues to be important. We'll continue to look at library. The first-party data that we're getting off the app, we basically can tell based on title, box, and age of library, when it's important to our service. And so we're not buying bulk like we used to anymore, where we just go to a, you know, buy a library of this many dollars. We'll say, "These are the titles we want. These are the ages we want.
This is what we're willing to pay for it." So streaming has given us a lot more insight into what movies actually perform against our demos. When you couple. You know, you look at churn, which we really focus on lifetime value extension and churn reduction. If you watch an original and a Pay One movie, your lifetime value is four X longer than if you just watch an original.
Mm.
It's really important to have both of those two components together, working hard to drive profitability in the business.
You also referenced, I think, that you are refreshing the age of your original slate. Is that something, I think, that changes over time if you're thinking about how the film output strategy fits into the broader content portfolio?
Yeah, I mean, look, again, we have always said that we're using content as a way to drive lifetime value and reduce churn, right?
Yeah.
So when we started with Power, we had one show. We would see, I'm making this up, 1 million subs come on in the first week, and at week 10, 40% would leave because we didn't have an original behind them. And so we built out the Power franchise and with BMF and P-Valley, so that when you bring those customers on for their first show for 10 weeks, we would tie the finale of Power to the premiere of BMF. And so we would move 80% of the audience from the first 10 weeks to the second 10 weeks, and so we would double the lifetime value of the customer just by content spend, right? So we weren't in the marketplace competing for subs with dollars and acquisition. We had the subs, so now we're gonna spend money to drive lifetime value.
We've seen lifetime value go up 40% in the last two years, just because of the way we schedule and line up content against that. So the reality is, we know we need a certain amount of originals to kinda keep that customer for the 52 weeks, and then we can throw in big tenfold movies like Hunger Games and John Wick in gaps that we have that can bridge us to that next original. So I think the portfolio is the right number. The way that we get to the 20% margin long term is by refreshing the age of the originals, right? So we've got a lot of shows that are in their fourth and fifth season. When you go from season three to season four is when the cost of a show really accelerates.
It's really like salary cap management in the NFL, right? You've got to look at the show of the arc, you've got to realize where it sits and what's the allowable in the portfolio. And you know, as the show's getting expensive, you have to have something in development that looks and feels like it, that you could replace it with. So you go back to season 1 economics versus season 5 economics, and that's the kind of path we're in right now to get to that 20% margin business coming out of fiscal 2027.
Jeff's had a hit show, Outlander. You want to talk about a little bit about the prequel?
Yeah, so we've got Outlander. It's, it's going into season eight, which we've announced is the last season, which is fortunate because it's got such a passionate, great fan base. We also are now shooting the prequel called Blood of My Blood, which is 20 years earlier than the first season. And it's, it's a spectacular story. The same writers, Diana's writing prequel books now, which will be great for the fan base. But I think it's really gonna be... The fan base is gonna love it when they see it. There are, I won't ruin it for people, but there are some things that you will see in the prequel that you read about in the books, that you never actually see in the books, or you actually see in the show that we bring to the, to the screen for the first time.
So I think it's gonna be a spectacular continuation of that franchise. And so you take that, you know, that will end at eight. We'll bring this one on. Then you've got Serpent Queen, which comes from from 3 Arts, which is a phenomenal show. There's a whole plan that when we get out to season three, there's spinoffs coming off of that. And so when we find shows that work and work really well, because we know the DNA for those two core audiences, we take stories out of each of those shows to extend the life, but to reset the kind of cost basis of the season one shows so that we don't have gaps for our portfolio.
So we're able to manufacture audience based on the fact that each of these shows are one click to the left or right of the core that drove a lot of audience. So we're not taking big swings that are out of left field. So we know when we do a BMF and we do a BMF spinoff, we know that that's gonna have the DNA of those shows. It's gonna have the same producers. We'll bring some of the cast over. We'll bring some cast from other shows into other shows to keep that universe together, and so that we know that we can manufacture hits at that season one economics versus season five.
Do we have a date on the last Outlander season and?
We do not.
Blood of My Blood.
We do not.
We do, but we're not telling.
We do not. We do not.
I'll have to tell my sister. She is-
We are shooting both right now, in Scotland. But the fan base is really itching for it. I think the cast knows, but I don't think anybody else knows from there.
Got it. I'll wait for that announcement. So, you know, you talked about bridging shows with other shows that are at the similar vein. I think about that concept as it relates to churn and churn management and the price increase you rolled through. I think you referenced it at the top, the first digital price increase. Can we have the postmortem on that?
Sure.
Like, what's the lessons that you've learned, and what do you think going forward? Do you think that the prices rate increases will continue to be a main part of your kind of revenue growth?
Yeah, look, I think there, there's three components to revenue growth over the next couple of years. One of is these rate increases, so I'll talk about them. The other, obviously, is continued subscriber growth, probably through bundles more than straight à la carte at this point. Then I think it's bringing on revenue diversification long term through AVOD, which is a whole different conversation. But in terms of the rate increase, we did $1. It was our first rate increase in the history of the business. We've always wanted to be priced as a competitive service, so we always want to be below the broader-based streaming services. The nice thing that has happened in the business over the last couple of years is that everybody else has done one or two or three increases.
So it's given us a lot of room to stay below the broader-based streamers, because in the consumer's mind, you know, the bigger the gap is between us and the broad-based services, the consumer believes that we are complementary, not competitive. And so we wanted to stay away from the price points of the Netflixes and the Hulus and those higher price points. Whenever you look at a rate increase, and I did this for 15 years, unfortunately, in the cable business, you always look at what you yield, what you... from it, right? And what the yield is net is disconnects versus how much you had to give on a discount to keep a customer on. So you know, we did a $1 rate increase.
What I would say is, we were able to hold 60%+ of that rate increase, which is really good. And so it leads us to believe that we actually could have done more. I think the team did a phenomenal job of not only introducing it on the front end, but really managing the lifecycle on the back end. And I think the data really helped us build journeys for each of the customer groups. I'll give a quick example. We did it in front of Outlander, right? And in order to disconnect from a rate increase in the Starz app, you have to go into the settings screen to get there.
So we had an alarm that basically said that if you were an Outlander subscriber, you watched Outlander, and you were going to the settings screen, that you were likely to go, because you got the rate increase, you were likely to disconnect. And so what we did is, we threw that customer before they got there, a countdown clock to the next episode of Outlander and said: "Outlander is in 4 days, 12 minutes and 60 seconds." And half the people that went in there went back and didn't even go into the disconnect process. Then people that went in, we offered them multiple different ways to save that customer. And so we really look at churn from a long-term perspective. If you look at our churn, you know, post 6-12 months, it looks, reflects a lot like the old cable churn.
And so the goal is to use monthly month SKUs and yearly offers to get people on the service for greater than 6 months, because the business is really, really stable in growth at that point. So I think the rate increase was very well executed. I think we'll come back to it in the next, you know, 2-4 quarters and probably put another one in the business because we feel like we have room.
Just remember-
Yeah.
You raised prices $1, and he's far and away the best value proposition out there with hundreds and hundreds of movies, the Pay 1 deal, the Pay 2 deal, the original programming. You put a $1 price increase in there, and most of it sticks. Add that to 22 million subscribers per month, that's a lot of free cash flow.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You mentioned also subscriber growth over time through bundling partnerships. Do you see more opportunities for that? I mean, we talked a little bit about the Verizon and the Netflix and all that, but in the coming months, is there an expectation that that continues to proliferate and there's more opportunity for other partners to come on board?
Yeah. Look, I think you'll see bundling two ways. One, I think you'll see, and it's, it's kind of the size of the fish in the pond, right? So, you know, there are services that are smaller than us that, you know, that don't have the tech that we have and/or the, the, customer acquisition infrastructure that we built, that we could actually bundle into the Starz app and do a lot of that on their behalf, and I think you'll see some of that coming. I think you'll see the other way, where you look at our two core demos and our movies, right? These are really valuable assets to add to a broad-based service.
Anybody who really has a show or two that are focused on our two demos, we can actually put four or five shows against that show to help with churn for them. And if it's a tier upgrade, we share in the economics, so you don't have to spend content dollars to get churn reduction, and you can take some of our economics. So I think there's a way that you'll see us, just like we're on Amazon today, as a tier upgrade on a lot of these services. I also think you'll see us bundle in, because again, if you can take the Lionsgate Pay One, Universal Pay Two, our originals, commingle it within yours at a value discount, for consumers, you know, it's a really good service for both.
We had a bundle in LatAm, where we studied it for a long time, and lifetime value was 60% longer in that bundle than it was à la carte in that market. And so it works. What you give up for ARPU, you make in long-term retention. And so I think everybody's starting to kind of try to talk to them. I mean, David's talked about, you know, looking into more bundling in his service, and I think you'll see a lot of us sort of coming together and doing that for consumers.
Yeah.
Consumers ultimately get what they want, and they don't want five bills.
Right. Right. I would be remiss if not to dig a little bit deeper into the studio side as well of the business. You mentioned Adam Fogelson stepping in. What's the appetite to kinda invest behind more on that front, on the film side? And what are you excited about over the coming years in terms of the tentpole franchises?
You mean, this is my Sophie's Choice question?
Exactly.
Look, I think the Michael Jackson biopic has got the potential to be just a gigantic movie for us. We don't have a budget for giant hits. I think the idea that, you know, we'll have another Now You See Me is very exciting. This Mark Forster movie out of the Wonder universe, White Bird, is just a beautiful, beautiful movie. Borderlands, I'm happy to tell you I saw it. I finally saw it. It was, you know, a pandemic, and there was shooting schedules, and the movie is really fun. I saw Strauss Zelnick, who runs Take-Two, a couple of days ago, and it's a, you know, it's a big-selling game for them, and that's a movie. It was expensive, but it was... We have a great release date in August, and the movie is a lot of fun.
So I feel like we have, you know, it's very, very typical Lionsgate schedule. We'll have one or two tentpoles. I think this Ballerina, which is gonna come out, not this summer, but next summer with Ana de Armas in the John Wick universe, has a lot of potential to break out. Again, our motion picture business with, call it, 10-12 wide releases and another 30-40 of those are gonna be the multi-platform. You know, movies like Sisu, which is a movie we can buy for a nickel. Did you see Sisu?
I did.
I mean, look, we bought it for a nickel.
Great movie.
Who doesn't want to see Nazis get killed?
Exactly.
And so, we put the trailer. We spent $8 million, put the trailer on John Wick, and the movie did great business. You'll see us in the horror space. We have Imaginary coming out with Blumhouse. That's coming out in a couple of weeks, made for the right price point. I think it's highly likely that you'll see some other movies with Jason Blum, utilizing some of the IP that we have in the Lionsgate library, because nobody does horror better than Jason. I think that, again, it'll be the combination of a few big-budget movies, a lot of them right in the middle. You know, we have this movie, and again, it's a great movie, but it fits right in our wheelhouse.
We made a movie that Mel Gibson directed called Flight Risk, starring Mark Wahlberg. It's a thriller, and it's really fun and scary and, you know, my guess is the foreign sales pretty much cover the entire budget, maybe even more. So we're gonna stick to our model and put 40, 50 movies a year, theatrical movies or multi-platform, into the library, continue to make television shows, probably invest somewhere between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion of content, make money almost on every single piece of content, put it in the library, and continue to ring the cash register. I mean, the business is an odd business in many ways because, again, we weren't betting on any particular platform or technology. You know, I saw this, and you know, there was no AVOD, there was no fast channel.
It didn't even make any sense to me. But, you know, those businesses combined are gonna be $125 million of revenue to us next year. So and then, you know, I don't wanna hype it, but I did this demonstration. I reached out to this fellow that runs or founded Runway. Runway is a competitor. It's a unicorn, a competitor in many ways, but could be aligned with, for example, you know, Microsoft and all the things that they're doing in that AI world. But I said: Hey, take John Wick and take a few scenes, and I could show it to you, but you're even though you're in a technology conference, I can't show this.
Right.
But, and I'd probably get sued. But the idea is take John Wick, take a bunch, and give it to me and, you know, animate it... in a certain style, and it's incredible. And this is text to video-
Mm.
For the most part. So the idea when you have 25,000 titles in your library, and you have a lot of things, you're starting with source material, and you could say, "Hey, let's take an R-rated version, and let's do a PG-13 version of that particular... And we'll animate that." That's pretty exciting, and AI is gonna be great for special effects in the world of dubbing and subtitling and all of that. And, and so that's, that's exciting.
That mid-size tentpole strategy is really working out for you. I mean, are there lessons from revitalizing The Hunger Games franchise, as an example, where you have a view on how to structure some of these films and how to sustain that franchise for longevity?
We wondered whether we'd waited too long, but you have to wait... You know, Suzanne Collins, we have to wait for her to finish her book. I'm desperate for Stephenie Meyer to write another Twilight, because that franchise just keeps going and going and going, and it's just such a great, great thing for all of us. So what did we learn? We learned that great IP never dies.
Interesting. I mean, we are, I think, approaching the highest profit level at the segment for motion picture for some time now, probably eight years. How sustainable is that? Is that structural because of the library sales and the way that you're financing these films and the IP? Or do you think that, you know, this is a hit-or-miss business ultimately? And, well, what's preventing us from going back to that $200 million level that we were seeing more consistently in the prior years?
I think Adam Fogelson, if he was up here, he thinks he's gonna grow that, that number dramatically, because he's got the bread-and-butter business on a multi-platform, and it's just a question of getting the right wide releases and the right economic model. So I'd look for growth in that area. I'd look for television, you know, with, as I talked about, Twilight and John Wick, and, you know, Mad Men, for example. From a library standpoint, I think that comes back to us in October. You know, that television series is gonna have a lot of interest-
Mm-hmm
... in the world of the library. So I feel like that you're asking specifically about the motion picture business. I think that Adam's gonna grow that business significantly.
Got it. Well, we're out of time, but really appreciate both of you being here. Thanks so much.
Thanks for having us.