BREAKING NEWS! EXCLUSIVE: I’ve learned that the auction for the Terminator movie, TV program, and other spin-off rights just ended after a marathon bidding session today that stretched from 3 PM this afternoon until 8 PM tonight. Both Sony Pictures and Lionsgate separately were bidding for the franchise, and then joined up after the first round was completed. “We’re going to fight one hell of a fight,” a Lionsgate insider told me in advance. Its plans were for “a complete re-boot, back to basics, with real emotional stories, and effects that will be secondary.
Alas, the studios didn’t come away the winners — which, I’m told, prompted a furious Sony Pictures Entertainment’s president of worldwide affairs Peter Schlessel to “storm out” of the Downtown LA offices of FTI Capital Advisors holding the auction. (Sony had distributed Terminator 4: Salvation internationally.) Instead, Halcyon Holding Corp accepted the $29.5 million bid from, of all parties, the debtholder which pushed it into bankruptcy, Santa Barbara-based hedge fund Pacificor. (This is the same Pacificor whom Halcyon accused in a lawsuit of extortion, bribery, and fraud and demanded $30M in damages.)
Tonight, Sony and Lionsgate dropped out at just under $29.5 million when it became clear that Pacificor “was willing to pay almost any amount of money for Terminator,” an insider tells me. Halcyon will receive $5 million for every Terminator movie made from now on, as well as retains the rich revenue streams from the movies Terminator 3 and 4. Sources behind Halcyon claim to me that the arrangement made now wipes out the debt Halcyon owed to Pacificor and all the other creditors. Of course, the deal is subject to approval by the bankruptcy court. It will be presented to the judge at a hearing on Thursday.
Back on May 9, 2007, rights to the Terminator series passed from producers Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar to the privately funded Halcyon Co (formed by entrepreneurs Victor Kubicek and Derek Anderson) for a reported $30 million. It was Pacificor that lent Halcyon the money to conclude the deal. Once Pacificor pushed Halcyon into Chapter 11, the Terminator franchise went up for sale. Lionsgate was selected as the stalking horse bidder with a ground floor offer of $15 million. Obviously the Hollywood entities kicking the tires on this rights offer, including Summit Entertainment and Media Rights Capital, didn’t think this character/concept was played out. After all, Terminator 4: Salvation made $380M worldwide. But who knows what Pacificor will plan for the project now…
- ‘The Terminator’ Rights Worth Only $15M?
- Halcyon Picks Lionsgate As ‘Terminator’ Stalking Horse Bidder
- ‘Terminator’ Future To Be Decided by Feb 1
- Rights To ‘Terminator’ Franchise For Sale
- Joss Whedon Makes Bid For ‘Terminator’
- If You Care About Another ‘Terminator’…
- ‘Terminator’ Producers Accuse Hedge Fund Of Extortion, Bribery, Fraud; Lawsuit Seeks $30M In Damages
- MGM Accused Of Threats To ‘Terminator 4’
So the auction was probably just a front all along so Halcyon and Pacificor could settle their nonsense.
and the next screenwriter on the project will be paid WGA minimum.
Nikki – Great to see you getting another scoop. This one, however, needs a correction. While the deal will not be finalized/approved at least until Wednesday, it is not true that this settlement clears Halcyon of its other debts. This only erases Pacificor’s claim. The unsecured creditors’ claims remain. And how do I know this? Talented colleagues are among the unsecured creditors (and still owed real money).
Seems like Halcyon and Pacificor used the Studios to establish base value of their premeditated deal.
Pretty sleazy outfit that Halcyon. Playing Studios for fools, rivals or not, is not how you do Business in this town. People in have long memories.
Ding, ding, ding…we have a winner.
The debtor outbid itself? Why would anyone want “The Terminator” franchise at this point? The TV series was alright, but in the end failed. “T4” BARELY made it’s money back, and that was ONLY because of the foreign B.O. and the series has been stretched to the limit conceptually.
The biggest thing everyone wanted to see was the insides of “Cyberdyne” in the future, which was a ridiculous let down of epic proportions. What else is there left to do?
They could reboot the series, but even that’s a epic SIGH.
Someone needs to hold Peter Schlessel and tell him everything is going to be alright. Rockaby.
The television show was better than T3 and T4. Season 1 was really good. Season 2 started off good, went off track in the middle, but really picked up in the end. The last 6 episodes were just as good, if not better than season 1. I think the franchise has one more shot at making a good movie. I say for now, bring T:SCC back and wait a few years for another movie. Mcgee just isn’t the right man for the job.
couldn’t agree more. T4 had no story. SCC rocked at the end.
Terminator was good.
T2 was great.
T3 was stupid.
TV meh.
T4 complete crap.
A reboot would be like stepping in the same turd twice. Go for it. It’s not my shoe.
T1 was excellent, one of the best sci-fi movies of all time.
T2 was good, not great, it suffered from the Bigger Better!! complex of sequels and JC was annoying as hell.
T3 was complete shit.
T:SCC was actually a LOT better than I had anticipated, foregoing T3 was a good idea and the 2nd season ended on a hell of a cliffhanger.
T4 was a ‘good’ popcorn movie let down by the worst ending I have seen since the theatrical I Am Legend.
Thanks for your opinion but it is in fact just your opinion and others feel much different about each of the movies and the show.
McG delivered a totally useless, bang ‘n crash feature…slap-dash crap…total headache…don’t they realize Cameron and Hurd originally crafted a love story amidst all the sturm and drang…
Reboot…
Let’s look at the bright side. Sony won’t have to lay off more people to pay their share of the purchase price for a questionable franchise which may have run its course.
Whoopie!
You make an inference that is incorrect and your readers seem to jump right in. A secured creditor has a “credit” that it can bid. This is true in every situation. So Pacificor is not paying with cash, but with what it is owed. Pacificor would bid up to the amount owed because it is “owed first” being a secured creditor. It was always going to bid its credit, because Terminator is an asset that will have some value and Pacificor knows it will never see actual cash from Halcyon. Any and every secured creditor would have done the same thing. Now, Pacificor may sell Terminator to the bidders or decide to hold on and see what it can do with Terminator. Either way, this was not a surprise and plays out like every other bankruptcy involving a secured creditor. The only surprise is that you and your readers are acting like this is a surprise.
Anon-
Thanks for clearing this up. I was thinking something similar (you have to assume Halcyon’s creditors would get pennies on the dollar, at best, so why shouldn’t they use every penny of their debt to take Halcyon’s limited assets).
I think, at the end of the day, Pacificor is less than interested in being a producer on a new Terminator property. They just wanted to own an asset that someone else was interested in buying, so they can make a greater percentage back of what they are owed.
The only question left is does Sony or Lionsgate buy the franchise from Pacificor (or do they maybe they will team up again).
You are correct. You can be certain the Pacificor is not going to be going into the motion picture production business. They will probably go make a deal with Sony or Lionsgate or both (as they were the most active bidders) and this will allow Pacificor to a) get some $$$ back from its bad investment and b) get some profit participation in new Terminator movies. So, in a sense, they will get the opportunity to see if they can get anything above the roughly $30M that the studios bid, which would be gravy for them. They are not going to use this to launch a studio, production company, distribution, etc. This is about dollars, cents and making sense.
A reboot of a reboot?! Urgh.
I suspect Pacificor have no interest in these rights beyond trying to turn them around and sell them in a couple of years to yet another well financed but naive start up like Halcyon for a profit.
Of course they won’t make any money on these rights. Expect someone like Legendary or Arnon Milchan’s new outfit to pick them up in a few years for a bargain basement price.
It will be interesting to see what direction the franchise goes after the sale goes through. Something in 2012, maybe?
Nikki – Love ya, but please stop mentioning MRC as a serious bidder for this. Every single thing they’ve done has bombed horribly and they are very close to being out of business. They are not even close to being able to act on something like this.
Have to agree… Any financier would have to be an idiot to give MRC more money… My guess is that they’ve lost close to $100 million already. The poor, hapless Asif is gonna go down as one of the bigger fools in Hollywood history… No small accomplishment in this town.
Owning a franchise is one thing.
Making a movie is another.
Distributing that movie is the most important thing.
They have one out of three right now.
Terminator Salvation was an awesome movie. It was misunderstood but it was awesome and I loved it. T3 was complete crap and the TV show is not even worth a mention.
I agree. I own it and love it.
@giddi
although i didnt think T3 was complete crap (i liked it but not as much as 1, 2, and 4) and i didnt watch the sarah conner chronicles (cuz if there’s a set timeline and universe in a franchise, dont eff w/ it), i completely agree with u
terminator 1 and 2 were great, but T3 was good but not that good IMO, and then i really liked T4
so here it is in order of my like-level IMHO:
– T2
– T1 (maybe T4 belongs here but i do like the direction this went and that it was the start of this whole franchise)
– T4 (WAY better than T3, but not as good as T2)
– T3 (not terrible but not that good)
i’m lookin forward to T5, just hope they continue the movie from T4 and not do anything risky in the past. maybe introduce some of the time-travel elements (maybe the 5th will take place when they send kyle reese back and skynet sends the 1st arnold (this culd be at the end of the movie), but also get some present dilemmas w/ john’s son, wut happend to marcus, and continuing the fight against skynet) and get arnold in there 4 reals this time lol
I think I’m interested in “TS: Terminator the Sale” than a probable T5.
Cameron is converting “T2” into 3D. Something the new rights holders should watch carefully to see how to make a good movie.
Pacificor now owns the box that contains all the pieces of the Terminator – but it won’t mean a thing if they can’t put those pieces together in the proper order. Otherwise, you’ll just end up with a godawful mess like ‘Terminator: Salvation’.
Lord, the only good thing that stupid movie accomplished was to prove once and for all that Sam Worthington is NOT Russell Crowe. Crowe is alive, he’s got a volcano inside him! Worthington, though, was so dead I didn’t need the script to tell me he was playing a robot.
For T5 they should go back in time and neutralize all the lampreys who attached themselves to the franchise after Cameron and Hurd left. The technology already exists as evinced by the industry’s obsession with remakes, reboots, sequels and spin-offs. Not only is the future not written, it isn’t even in development.
A re-boot? I think Arnold will be available soon…
“Terminator” was a great concept for films and they have proven themselves with film after film pulling in big revenue with both box office and merchandise sales. Hollywood has been very succesful with reboots of franchises like “Batman”, “James Bond”, and “Star Trek” making more money than any previous films of the franchises. If done right, a “Terminator” reboot could be BIG!
I think T1 was a great movie, T2 was different but still great. T3 was good, the series was good too, but T4 definitely left something to be desired. Having said that i still think there is life in the terminator franchise, what we all wanna see is a more imaginative and scarier (remember T1 was more of a scifi/horror movie) showing of the apocalptic future that was brewing in our mind since the first movie. The reason T4 was a letdown was it couldn’t come close to living up to the hype that most of us had built up since 84.
Movies 1 and 2: Awesome
Movies 3 and 4: ok
Movies 1 to 4: very boring in comparison to the Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Very boring COMPARED to SCC? Isn’t it the other way around? Did you SEE Season 2 of SCC? While Season 1 was great, Season 2 was SOOOOO SLOOOOOOW. Literally nothing would happen, yet they weren’t stand alone episodes where they had one-off stories.
The only episode that I didn’t really like was “Some must watch while some must sleep”, other than that, I thought the show was awesome.
The only way I’m interested in any more Terminator movies is if it directly follows “Born to Run”, preferably with the same cast.
I have to agree that Terminator 4 was very bad. Christian Bale, while good as Batman, sucked as John Connor. The Sarah Connor Chronicles was really good and I liked how it disregarded Terminator 3, as that movie could’ve been better. The only reason The Sarah Connor Chronicles didn’t make it was because FOX is stupid and kills any show that isn’t filled with stupid trailer trash rednecks trying to win a million dollars in some so called reality show.