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Byron Allen In Deal To Buy Majority Stake Of Buzzfeed For $120 Million

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Allen Family Digital, an affiliate of Byron Allen’s family office, under has a deal to acquire a majority stake in digital media company Buzzfeed with Byron Allen becoming chairman and CEO.

Current chief executive will transition to a newly created role as president of BuzzFeed AI.

Under the terms of the agreement, Allen Family Digital will acquire 40 million shares of publicly traded BuzzFeed at a price of $3 a share for a total purchase price of $120 million. Upon closing, Allen FamilyDigital will own about 52% of the company’s outstanding shares.

The purchase price will be funded with $20 million in cash at closing and a $100 million promissory note due five years from closing, accruing interest at 5% annually.

The transaction is expected to close by the end of May subject to customary closing conditions. Peretti said that the the digital company in planning significant changes under new management including cost reductions and, with the cash infusion, setting up BuzzFeed Studios to pursue vertical micro-dramas, animation, digital video and feature films.

Buzzfeed also owns The Huffington Post, which it acquired from Verizon Media in 2021.

Peretti co-founded the site in 2006 and took it public in a SPAC merger in 2021. The news division shuttered in 2023 amid downsizing.

“Byron’s vision, operational experience, and long-term commitment to premium content makes him exceptionally well-positioned to lead BuzzFeed and HuffPost into our next phase of growth,” Peretti said. “And personally, I’m thrilled Byron is taking over The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’s time slot, and highly confident that his relationships with talent will bring some incredible stars to the BuzzFeed platform.”

Peretti said he will switch focus “to a more hands-on role developing products and technology that are only possible because of recent advances in AI. I’m convinced that AI will fundamentally transform the media industry and empower creative people to build in new ways, and I believe the opportunity is enormous.”

Allen said the goal is to expand into free-streaming video, audio and user-generated content. “As of this moment, with the power of AI, BuzzFeed is officially chasing YouTube to become another premiere free video streaming service.”

Under Peretti’s leadership, he said, “BuzzFeed became one of the defining digital media brands of a generation, pioneering social distribution, viral content, and AI-assisted publishing.”

Allen is the founder, chairman and CEO of Allen Media Group which owns 13 TV stations, affiliates of ABC, CBS and NBC in 11 markets, as well 10 HD television networks including The Weather Channel, The Grio, Pets.TV and Comedy.TV. Allen owns a two-hour nightly comedy block on CBS Network and also produces, distributes, and sells advertising for 74 television programs, making him one of the largest independent producers/distributors of first-run syndicated television programming.

He’s been on the prowl for a deal, having pursued, among other targets, BET, Paramount and the NFL’s Denver Broncos. He recently acquired a big chunk of newly standalone Starz, prompting that company to put a one-year poison pill in place.

The sale news included Buzzfeed’s latest quarterly numbers. Revenue fell 12.4% to $31.6 million for the three months ended in March. Ad revenue dropped about 20%. Content revenue surged 69% to $7.5 million. Commerce and other revenue declined 32% year-over-year to $6.9 million.

Net losses widened to $15 million from $12.5 million.

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Anne-Marie MacKay Signs With Established Artists

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EXCLUSIVE: Anne-Marie MacKay, veteran writer-producer and co-founder of Propaganda Films, has signed with Established Artists for management.

Also a founding member of Palomar Pictures, Riddle Studios and Wondros, MacKay is credited with helping to launch the directing careers of David Fincher, Michael Bay, Antoine Fuqua, Gore Verbinski, Michel Gondry, Sofia Coppola, Mark Romanek, Dominic Senna and Alex Proyas. She also has worked with David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Sir Michael Apted, Ben Stiller, Forest Whitaker, Lee Daniels, and David O. Russell, providing both long and short-form opportunities for the filmmakers.

Emmy- and Grammy-nominated MacKay’s producing credits include Bleecker Street’s The Last Word, directed by Mark Pellington, Foster Boy, executive produced by Shaquille O’Neal and starring Matthew Modine and Louis Gossett Jr., Showtime’s Suge Knight feature documentary American Dream, American Knightmare, directed by Antoine Fuqua, Walter Mosley’s Always Outnumbered for HBO and the Cannes/Sundance selection The Girl from Nagasaki

“Anne-Marie is a visionary builder and a true titan of our industry whose impact on modern
filmmaking and culture is undeniable,” said manager Corey Simon at Established Artists. “Her ability to discover and elevate singular artistic voices is legendary. I am deeply honored to partner with her as she continues to create groundbreaking, high-caliber stories for film and television.”

On the TV literary front, MacKay continues to be represented by Scott Kaufman at Buchwald.

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Anonymous Content To Produce Film Adaptation of Baldwin: A Love Story

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Production company Anonymous Content is entering a new era where they are looking to become a financier in the film marketplace, rather than just a “fee-for-hire production company,” which will allow them to finance their own projects.

For one of the new projects, announced during the Bloomberg Screentime conference Thursday, Anonymous has commissioned author Nicholas Boggs, to write the script for a feature film adaptation of Boggs’ Baldwin: A Love Story, along with his partner, author Marlon James, author of The Disappearers. The project will be co-produced with Higher Ground.

Additionally, the company, backed by Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, said it will look to move into live events including Broadway and potentially move into the content creation space. This comes after the Emerson Collective made a “material investment” in the company in January, alongside Walker’s appointment as CEO.

“So there’s no doubt that the content creators, these independent content creators, figuring out how to have a portal to that community, that community of writers, that community of creators in places that we don’t normally go, and making sure we have team members who can have tentacles in those places,” Walker said. “And then looking at things like theatrical, and looking at different ways for us to work. And when I say theatrical, I mean Broadway. I mean live events.”

As part of this new era, under Walker, who joined in January after serving as the president of the Ford Foundation, the company is also reconstituting the board, with Jobs joining as a board member, alongside former HBO CEO Richard Plepler.

“We have been a fee-for-hire production company. We have not invested for the most part. We have not been lead, in part because we haven’t invested. The board now and Emerson has made it possible for us to become a financier in the market, so we’ll be able to co-finance, finance, take the lead in financing in film,” Walker said.

“It’s necessary because fee-for-service is a bad way to build a company,” Jobs added.

They added that this will mean the balance sheet for the company will increase, but that the company will have “an envelope” with which to make the financing decisions.

“It’s is a slight, subtle change in priorities when you look for excellence, when you look for the highest quality, when you look for material that moves humans and touches us and stays inside us and reminds us of what we’re capable of, if that’s your number one, and then making money is number two, then you actually end up making films that people really want to see that,” Jobs said.

More to come.

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‘You Can See Everything’ Directors Explain Their Elizabeth Holmes Doc

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“I guess we should just start at the beginning, and tell us how this happened,” New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim asked filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim at a Q&A after a screening of You Can See Everything on Wednesday night.

It was the second public showing of the documentary, which was filmed in and over years and blew the roof off the Telluride Film Festival (see Deadline review). It’s a hard-to-describe flow of verité filmmaking unspooling in real time at the San Diego home of disgraced biotech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she reported to Bryan federal prison in Texas. The Stanford dropout and Theranos founder is still serving a 10-year sentence for defrauding investors in the high-profile case.

Fielder and Oppenheim said the project, oddly, was launched during a magic show the two friends attended in L.A. in 2023, at the height of Holmes’ notoriety. “A magician there asked for a celebrity’s name, and someone called out ‘Elizabeth Holmes’,” Oppenhiem said. “I was like, so interesting. Elizabeth Holmes.” He said he “had just heard that she was looking for someone to document her life and that she had reached out to A24.”

Fielder was also curious. “I knew that she hadn’t… spoken to anyone in, I think, seven years. Total silence.” He didn’t necessarily see a documentary brewing “because it felt like the story was very told. But I was really curious to meet her, just as a personal thing.”

Holmes’ epic rise and fall was the subject of an HBO documentary and a Hulu miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried.

Fielder called A24, and went to meet Holmes. “I remember having this weird experience… where I’m like, “She seems so genuine at times. But then I’m like, no… I know she’s a liar… It was a weird mental thing.” Homes has always insisted she did nothing wrong.

She agreed to let the cameras into the home she shares with with her partner Billy Evans and their two young children.

Fielder made no promises to A24. “We don’t know what the story is. But we want to see what happens,” he said. The studio said, “‘OK, that’s fine. And if you want to pull the plug anytime, you can.’ Which was amazing.”

L-R: Lance Oppenheim, Nathan Fielder and the New York Film Festival’s Dennis Lim

Jill Goldsmith/Deadline

They started filming. “And after, Lance and I would talk about what we thought happened there, and we’d completely disagree on… what we thought was happening. And we were like, ‘Oh, this is really interesting, if we can’t agree on what’s happening, there’s something here.’ And our curiosity sort of just like drove us from there.”

The filmmakers ultimately moved from one camera to three, shooting 16 hours a day with two small crews of which no more than four individuals were in the house at any one time. “We had a wide lens that would cover the whole house so if something happened, we wouldn’t miss it. And then the other two … lenses could be wide but then also zoom, so we could basically capture everything,” said Oppenheim.

“We were trying… essentially, to just take all the pressure away from any moment, so they wouldn’t really know what we were interested in necessarily.”

“Actually, we didn’t always either,” Fielder added.

“One thing we realized with the [initial] one camera that’s panning, which you see in some of the earlier scenes, is that the moment you say something to someone you want to see their face the moment they hear it. Especially in a movie like this, where you’re trying to evaluate if someone’s being honest or not. And when you have to swing, you’re missing a few seconds. And you realize this is maybe a problem in this kind of thing,” Fielder said.

He himself went from solely behind the camera to very much on, registering reactions to Holmes, including to her circular responses to questions like did she know her claims about Theranos’ blood-testing kit were false.

Fielder said he has no idea why she and Evans granted them the access they did.

“It’s so hard to understand… Maybe there was a sense that inviting someone who was a friend of theirs, no one would take that seriously. So I don’t know. It’s so hard to speculate as to why.”

You Can See Everything opens in theaters October 16.

“I cannot tell you how weird it was that we were there,” Fielder said. “Why I’m excited for the movie to come out is I’m really curious to hear what everyone else thinks and what they make of certain things. I think it will actually help me understand… So I’ve been looking forward to this release for a while.”

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