Merchant bank Forest Road is to take a majority stake in media investment bank ACF.
With offices in the UK and the USA, ACF has led multiple high profile media deals including the sale of The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit intellectual property to Embracer Group and the securitisation of Simon Cowell’s Syco Entertainment’s Got Talent franchise.
ACF has also helped to sell Pilgrim Studios to Lionsgate, Leftfield Entertainment to ITV plc, Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones company, Broke & Bones, to Netflix and Bear Grylls Ventures to Banijay.
ACF will continue operating under the ACF brand and ACF’s Chief Executive Officer, Thomas Dey, will continue to lead the company.
The head of Forest Road’s advisory platform, Jeremy Tarica, will oversee ACF’s integration into the broader Forest Road business.
The combined group will target intellectual property holders, brands, and businesses in the Media and Entertainment space. This includes mergers and asset sales from the large studios, deals that support the growth of the SVOD channels with premium content, talent management and agency deals, and the increased appetite for foreign language content and the necessary geographic expansion.
“We are thrilled to welcome ACF to the Forest Road family, with their impressive track record of selling premium IP and facilitating iconic transactions across the globe in the content production arena. We are confident that, together, we can unlock incredible opportunities for growth within our portfolio, augmenting the capabilities of our respective businesses, said Jeremy Tarica, Chief Executive Officer of Forest Road Securities.
“In a rapidly evolving media environment we need to match our client and market needs and evolve ourselves. This is a tremendously exciting next step in growing ACF’s capability by joining the Forest Road family. By uniting with this incredibly ambitious and well-connected team we are accelerating the fire power of the service offering. The media landscape is growing more sophisticated, and our clients ’needs are growing. With this transaction I am confident we can raise the standards further and deliver an even better-quality client solution,” said Thomas Dey, Chief Executive Officer of ACF Investment.
Los Angeles based Forest Road works across sectors including Media & Entertainment, Renewable Energy, Digital Assets, and Life Sciences. Forest Road and its operating subsidiaries now have over 80 employees, $1 billion of cumulative capital deployed and over 900 media projects financed or distributed.
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