Will anyone listen to new controller?
What won what where
Surprisingly little, despite Disney selling the film company to an investment group led by construction magnate Ron Tutor and including Colony Capital's Tom Barrack. In fact, the new owners have not produced a single film - nor put any into development. THR's Daniel Miller has a lengthy piece that examines the company and Tutor's involvement.
Since August 2010 -- about four months before the Miramax transaction closed -- Tutor has sold $188 million of Tutor Perini stock, doing so at increasingly lower prices. The liquidation has at least partly funded Tutor's film ventures, he said in a March conference call with analysts who cover Tutor Perini, and has considerably reduced his stake in the company. In 2008, when his namesake firm combined with Perini Corp., he owned about 43 percent of the new company's shares; he was down to about 23 percent by the end of 2011. And in a September federal filing, Tutor Perini's board allowed Tutor to sell 100 percent of his stock if he chooses. "I hated every sale of stock I've made since the first one," said Tutor in a call last year.
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From the outset, some observers scoffed that the nearly $700 million Tutor and partners paid to Disney was too pricey for a library without an A-list franchise like Twilight or The Hunger Games to exploit and no Weinsteins (who partnered with supermarket investor Ron Burkle to try to reacquire their company) at the helm to generate future hits. Weinstein Co. COO David Glasser says that under the Weinsteins, Miramax would have been run differently. "It wouldn't have just been monetizing the library but growing it by adding new titles to it. For us and Ron Burkle, that's where we saw the value," he says.
Tutor's other big headache is with embattled film financier David Bergstein. The two have been tangled up in several legal disputes related to Bergstein's ventures.