Seventeen years after selling Miramax to Disney for $80 million, the brothers Weinstein are looking to reacquire the company after the Mouse House shut it down in 2009. Miramax was founded in 1979 and in its thirty-year history the specialty-film company had a catalog of 611 titles. With help from billionaire financier Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa group, and hedge funds Fortress and Colbeck Capital, Burkle and Co. would be the buyers, but Harvey and Bob Weinstein would run the company.
As of last week, Deadline Hollywood reported that the price was at $625 million. The Weinsteins had planned to pay $600 million. Initially, Disney had wanted more than $700 million for the company name and library.
The Pulse: Disney should let bygones be bygones. Yes, the Weinsteins burned many bridges as the O&Os of Miramax, but the duo was responsible for making Disney culturally relevant in the last half of the ’90s after the animation department hit a wall after the release of The Lion King in 1993. To their credit, they were the leaders of the independent film movement of the nineties; Miramax allowed directors like Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Anthony Minghella to flourish, and the studio distributed such films as Princess Mononoke, Amelie, and Il Postino.
Though, there’s a side of me that wonders if the Weinsteins are the right guys to control the Miramax label again. Their own start-up, The Weinstein Company, is on shaky ground. Distribution of the Weinstein Co. films on home video has been poor through its label Genius Products. It was so rough that World Wrestling Entertainment bailed out of its distribution partnership with Genius and went with Vivendi Entertainment instead. And box office success has been mostly a miss since 2005. The brothers bet on the wrong horse with Nine and should have went all in with Inglourious Basterds, but they needed co-financing with Universal Pictures, who took a majority stake, in getting it made.
If the brothers are smart, if and when they gain control of the Miramax label (which also includes Dimension Films), the smart play would be to milk the home video library for all it’s worth on DVD and Blu-ray. This would include a proper special edition release of Scream and the sequels to coincide with the release of Scream 4 in Summer 2011. Proper 16:9 transfers for From Dusk Till Dawn and Good Will Hunting, among others. And if the third Halloween sequel gets made, how about special editions of Halloween: H20 – Twenty Years Later and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. The Producer’s Cut would be nice. Guillermo Del Toro’s Mimic never got a proper release, so make a special edition with Del Toro’s director’s cut and have it coincide with the release of The Hobbit in theaters.
And of course there’s always the often-talked-about-but-still-nothing-yet U.S. releases of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair and Grindhouse: Theatrical Edition with all the faux trailers included.
Sound Off: So how do you guys feel about Miramax potentially being sold to the Weinstein brothers? Are the brothers already in over their heads with The Weinstein Company, or can they make Miramax the giant it once was?
Credit: The Hollywood Reporter / Deadline Hollywood
