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    Dick Clark Productions Sold To China’s Wanda For $1 Billion 

    By SHOOTUpdated:No Comments1737 Views
    In this undated image released by PRNewsFoto/Dick Clark Productions. Inc., shows the company logo. (PRNewsphoto/Dick Clark Productions Inc. via AP)
    BEIJING (AP) --

    China's Dalian Wanda Group has added another entertainment trophy to its stable of overseas acquisitions, paying $1 billion for Dick Clark Productions, the TV company that produces the Golden Globes and the "Miss America" pageant.

    Wanda is one of China's most important conglomerates and China's largest property developer. Its chairman, Wang Jianlin, is China's richest man by most measures, with an estimated net worth exceeding $32 billion.

    The company owns AMC Theatres and bought Legendary Entertainment for $3.5 billion in January. In September, it announced a movie partnership with Sony Pictures.

    Diversifying away from China's weakening property market, Wanda Group has made entertainment a major focus of its growth in recent years. It has openly embraced a mission to fend off Western imports in the Chinese market and become a globally recognized Chinese entertainment brand.

    That push into the U.S. entertainment industry has raised alarm among some American lawmakers concerned about creative freedom and the promotion of Chinese propaganda. A group of legislators recently asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office to review Chinese takeovers.

    The namesake company of legendary American television host Dick Clark was purchased in 2012 by a group including investment firm Guggenheim Partners. It produces several awards shows and the New Year's Eve countdown show in New York.

    Wanda said in a statement Friday that Dick Clark Productions' existing management "will remain in its entirety," and that both sides had reached a long-term operating agreement. It expects Dick Clark Productions to show "strong increases" in revenue and profit every year, but did not say whether its agreement with management was contingent on revenue targets.

    Wanda's statement said it expected to find ways to coordinate development between Dick Clark Productions and its previous deals in film, tourism and sports.

    Hollywood has eagerly welcomed Chinese partners. From 2000 to 2015, Chinese direct investment in U.S. entertainment firms amounted to $4 billion, according to Rhodium Group. That pace then skyrocketed in January with Wanda's purchase of Legendary, which almost doubled that total by itself.

    Category:News
    Tags:Dalian Wanda Groupdick clark productions



    Raoul Peck Resurrects A Once-Forgotten Anti-Apartheid Photographer In “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”

    Friday, November 22, 2024

    When the photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at the age of 49 from pancreatic cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his death was little noted.

    Cole, one of the most important chroniclers of apartheid-era South Africa, was by then mostly forgotten and penniless. Banned by his native country after the publication of his pioneering photography book "House of Bondage," Cole had emigrated in 1966 to the United States. But his life in exile gradually disintegrated into intermittent homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times ran alongside a list of death notices.

    But Cole receives a vibrant and stirring resurrection in Raoul Peck's new film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found," narrated in Cole's own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which opens in theaters Friday, is laced throughout with Cole's photographs, many of them not before seen publicly.

    As he did in his Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," the Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit with his subject. "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is drawn from Cole's own writings. In words and images, Peck brings the tragic story of Cole to vivid life, reopening the lens through which Cole so perceptively saw injustice and humanity.

    "Film is a political tool for me," Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. "My job is to go to the widest audience possible and try to give them something to help them understand where they are, what they are doing, what role they are playing. It's about my fight today. I don't care about the past."

    "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is a movie layered with meaning that goes beyond Cole's work. It asks questions not just about the societies Cole documented but of how he was treated as an artist,... Read More

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