Endeavor Content Rebrands As Fifth Season Following $785M Majority Sale To Korea’s CJ ENM
Endeavor Content has got a new name.
The company has rebranded to Fifth Season following Korean studio CJ ENM’s $785M deal to acquire an 80% stake.
It comes after the Korean media giant, which was behind films such as Oscar-winner Parasite, closed the deal to acquire the stake from Endeavor in January.
Endeavor Content was formed in 2017 from the production, sales, and distribution assets within Endeavor, WME, and IMG.
The move was expected as it doesn’t make sense to have a brand named after a 20% minority owner and the hope is that the rebrand will eliminate any remaining confusion over the company now known as Fifth Season’s ties to the parent company of talent agency WME.
The rebrand is effective today, September 7.
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Fifth Season, which is expected to produce more than $1B in television and film projects over the calendar year, is behind series such as Severance, See, Killing Eve, The Night Manager, Tokyo Vice, Normal People and upcoming projects such as Alma Har’el’s Lady in the Lake starring Natalie Portman for Apple and The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, Amazon’s first Australian original, starring Sigourney Weaver as well as films such as The Lost Daughter, Cha Cha Real Smooth and Tom Brady’s 80 For Brady.
The name comes from Eastern medicine, which recognizes a fifth season, a celebratory time of harvest in late summer.
The company is run by Graham Taylor and Chris Rice, who are Co-CEOs as well as COO Tim Robinson and CFO Kasee Calabrese. Joe Hipps, EVP, TV Development and Production runs the TV side of the business with Alexis Garcia, EVP, Film Group leading the features department. Kevin Iwashina is SVP, Documentary and Prentiss Fraser is EVP, Television Distribution.
Taylor told Deadline that the company was “blessed” to have a variety of options during the sale process but CJ ENM was its number one choice. “While it is a massive, $20 plus billion dollar publicly traded company, it very much feels like a family run business. Aspirationally for us, we want to be with partners that look at the business and make 10, 20, 30-year decisions, which is kind of antithetical to how the rest of Hollywood works,” he said.
The move will give the company more opportunities in Asia, building on its global businesses that includes stakes in British firms Motive Pictures, The Ink Factory and The Story Collective, Nordic Drama Queens in Scandinavia, Dreamchaser in Australia and Blink49 Studios in Canada.
Rice told Deadline that CJ ENM bought into its existing plan. “There’s no real change there. Obviously, we’d be crazy not to take advantage of the synergy opportunities and the full support from them has been fantastic.”
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