The Weinstein Company has created a film production fund with Russian billionaire Len Blavatnik to make movies budgeted between $5 million and $20 million, TheWrap has learned.
After emerging from a perilous financial situation this summer, Harvey Weinstein continues to prove that he has multiple lives.
The new fund — created among Blavatnik’s Access Industries, his newly purchased Icon UK Group and the Weinstein Company — will be a rolling credit facility that could support up to $100 million over the next two years.
Blavatnik, a Moscow-born businessman who lives between the U.S. and London, is ranked by Forbes among the world’s top 100 billionaires, with an estimated fortune of $7.5 billion.
He had been circling many potential projects in the entertainment industry, including bidding on MGM and considering a purchase of the Miramax library. This will be his first major foray into filmmaking.
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TWC will handle U.S. distribution for the films and will split international distribution with Icon.
TheWrap has learned multiple inside details of this new fund, the latest to aim at mid-budget productions that have been abandoned by the major studios:
The fund will be controlled by Blavatnik’s companies, Access and Icon. Icon is run by Stewart Till, the former CEO of United International Pictures. The partners will each have a certain number of “put” options for favored projects over the course of the deal.
Weinstein will distribute in the United States, Canada, Germany, France and Australia, putting up all of the funds for prints and advertising.
Icon will distribute in the United Kingdom and other foreign territories. Blavatnik and Weinstein will share the profits 50-50, with all revenues going into a single pot.
The companies have worked together before. Weinstein and Icon both have recently distributed such titles as “Nowhere Boy” (2009), “The Box” (2009), “A Single Man” (2009) and “The Road” (2009).
In November 2009, Blavatnik’s U.S.-based Access Industries financed Till in buying Icon Film Distribution, the international sales and film distribution arm of Los Angeles-based Icon Group, along with its Majestic film library.
