Weinstein Co. assets worth $1.3B? Not true, expert says
The Weinstein Company has entered talks with private equity firm Colony Capital to sell a bulk of its assets amid an uncertain future following sexual harassment allegations made against its co-founder, Harvey Weinstein.
While the official valuation of the privately held Weinstein Company is not available, the Weinstein brothers have claimed the company was worth $400 million and their television business was worth $900 million. However those numbers seem unrealistic to Variety's Senior Film and Media Editor Brent Lang.
“It’s a privately held company and over the years the Weinsteins have given out these kind of elaborate valuations for what their company is worth,” Lang told the FOX Business Network on “Mornings with Maria.”
The TV business currently owns “Project Runway” and has a bevy of promising projects coming forward including an upcoming drama series named “Yellowstone” starring Kevin Costner, the movies “The Current War” and “The Upside” and a distribution apparatus that could be of value, in Lang’s opinion.
“If you’re a company that wants to get into the movie business, it helps to have an infrastructure in place where you can actually be able to release films to theaters,” he said.
“The Current War,” at one time considered to be a 2018 Oscar hopeful, has been pulled from its November release. Lang said the scandal will be a distraction to the already mixed response to the Benedict Cumberbatch drama.
“These are the kind of films that really need movie stars to get behind... [Cumberbatch is] going to be asked at every single interview about Harvey Weinstein. That’s a problem if you are trying to release a movie about Thomas Edison,” he said.
Meanwhile, Harvey, despite being fired, will square off Tuesday with the board led by his brother Bob, who is expected to try to formally oust the disgraced film executive.
Lang said even though Harvey may walk away with a large sum of money from the potential sale, he pointed out how new accusations could have a legal fallout.
“He could be a rich man, but you have to also think with all these new accusers coming out, is that going to mean more legal liability for him? Are people going to start to go after him?” he said. “He really lived like a mogul and part of the way he was able to do that was putting his expenses through the company, so do the private jets go away?”