The Business Sheet- After spending nine months trying to close a $450-million film financing deal to offset the cost of 30 upcoming movies, Paramount has been forced to give up the chase.
The studio was working with Deutsche Bank to try to arrange what would be its third slate film-financing arrangement, but after the bank was unable to syndicate the senior debt part of the funding, the deal has come to a screeching halt ,and Deutsche Bank has decided to shutter its pioneering film-financing operation, according to the Financial Times.
Over the past four years more than $13 billion has poured into Hollywood from once-rich hedge funds, private-equity firms and investment banks in the form of co-financing deals with practically every major Hollywood studio. In fact, both Deutsche Bank and Paramount were early participants in such deals, with Paramount completing the first of these slate deals with Merrill Lynch in 2004 and Deutsche Bank following soon thereafter with a $600 million deal between Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Ryan Kavanaugh’s Relativity Media.
