Beverly Hills-based Genius Manufacturers Worldwide is buying animation producer Wow! Limitless Media for round USD$53 million (in money and inventory), marking its growth into Canada.
Listed here are the main points:
- Genius’s portfolio of exhibits contains Stan Lee’s Superhero Kindergarten, Rainbow Rangers, Llama Llama, and the forthcoming Shaq’s Storage. It additionally owns curated youngsters’ streaming platform Kartoon Channel.
- Wow! Homes two animation studios, Mainframe Studios (in Vancouver and Toronto) and Frederator Studios (in Burbank). They’ve labored on exhibits together with Madagascar: A Little Wild, Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures, Spy Youngsters: Mission Crucial, Castlevania, Journey Time, and The Pretty Oddparents.
- Wow! additionally owns Frederator Networks, identified for its community of hundreds of Youtube animation channels, which rack up over one billion views per thirty days. Like its namesake studio, it was based by veteran animation executive Fred Seibert.
- By buying Wow!, Genius will entry Canadian tax credit. It will permit it to “switch its present animation manufacturing at nice financial savings from China” to the Wow!-owned studios.
- The corporate will monetize in-house Wow! manufacturers, together with by means of licensing, and distribute a few of its content material on Kartoon Channel. It’s going to use Frederator’s Youtube channels to broaden its viewers to teenagers and younger adults.
- Wow! CEO Michael Hirsh will proceed to supervise Mainframe, Frederator Studios, Networks and Platforms. He’ll be part of Genius’s board of administrators.
- Genius chairman and CEO Andy Heyward mentioned in a press release:
The acquisition of Wow! considerably accelerates the monetary development of Genius Manufacturers, delivering on our promise to shareholders to execute significant and accretive acquisitions, as we search to quickly consolidate {the marketplace} and turn out to be the foremost producer, broadcaster, and shopper product licensor of high-quality youngsters’s leisure on the earth.
Picture at high: Wow! produced “Barbie Dreamhouse Adventures” (left) by means of Mainframe, and “Bee and Puppycat” (r) by means of Frederator Studios.
