Dangerous Liaisons
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Jon Feltheimer’s Analyst Call Remarks Final Good afternoon. Thank you, James, and thank you all for joining us in these extraordinary times. I hope you are staying safe and healthy. A few months ago, I could never have imagined some of the things we’d be talking about on this call – our employees working from home, film & TV production suspended, movie theatres closed and all of the other emergency adjustments we’ve made due to the pandemic. But as we report a strong quarter to end a fiscal year in line with our forecast, I’m also struck by how much we are continuing to accomplish, moving the Company forward on all fronts despite all of the challenges around us, and generating a lot of momentum heading into our new fiscal year. Let me share a few recent highlights and then I’ll drill down on each of our businesses and talk about how we’re transforming them to continue to operate successfully in this “new normal.” ➢ Starz’s streaming business is thriving in the at home environment as we reached 6.8 million paid domestic over the top subscribers in the quarter, well in excess of our projections, and it has continued its strong growth since then. ➢ Our STARZPLAY international platform is showing strong gains as well, with viewership up 20% since the pandemic began, driving international subscribers, including the StarzPlay Arabia platform and Canada, past the 5 million mark at fiscal yearend. 1 Jon Feltheimer’s Analyst Call Remarks Final ➢ PANTAYA more than doubled its subscriber base from 315,000 to nearly 700,000 paid subs in the fiscal year as it continues to deliver on its promise as the premium over-the- top destination for Spanish-language movies and original programming. ➢ We extended some of our biggest franchises, announcing the big screen adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, to be directed by Francis Lawrence. The new book is already driving triple-digit sales growth of the Hunger Games titles in our catalog. ➢ American Hustle’s Eric Warren Singer is writing Now You See Me 3 and we’re preparing to begin production on John Wick 4. Spiral, our re-imagining of Saw teaming Chris Rock & Samuel L. Jackson, opens next May ➢ And in television, we remain a supplier of choice for new buyers with the romantic comedy Love Life, starring Anna Kendrick, debuting on HBO Max next week. They have already announced that the series will be a centerpiece of their first Emmy campaign. As the global pandemic accelerates secular changes already in progress, our businesses are already well positioned to weather the current disruption and emerge stronger than ever in the “new normal.” ➢ To start, we have a great subscription platform at Starz that is profitable, growing and a major contributor to earnings. 2 Jon Feltheimer’s Analyst Call Remarks Final ➢ In this current environment, our content that has already been produced is more valuable than ever, with library revenue hitting a record $600 million in the fiscal year and our key brands generating higher license fees as we continue to extend them. ➢ We have full film & television pipelines poised to resume production and a slate of movies ready to distribute when theatres re-open and ➢ We have plenty of financial flexibility & liquidity with over $300 million in available cash at the end of the quarter and an undrawn revolver of $1.5 billion. The goal of combining Lionsgate & Starz was to build a premium global subscription platform backed by the full resources of our companies. Today that effort is achieving results. Our global streaming business reached more than 10 million worldwide OTT subs at the end of the quarter and will continue to grow to between 13 and 15 million paid subs by the end of the fiscal year. In a world where the value of making great content is matched only by the importance of determining how it is monetized, we are increasingly able to control our destiny through the continued rapid growth of the direct-to-consumer Starz app, which is now our third largest distribution platform in the U.S. We continue to apply a consumer-facing, data-driven strategy to the benefit of our over-the-top and MVPD partners alike. Our success in transitioning our shared Comcast customers to a la carte efficiently & effectively in the quarter allows us to continue to build on our longstanding partnership. 3 Jon Feltheimer’s Analyst Call Remarks Final On the programming front, we’ve established ourselves domestically as the premium destination for women and diverse audiences with a mix of proven hits like Outlander, which just completed its 5th season, outperforming season 4 and earning rave reviews… returning favorites such as Stephen Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience and a second installment of The Spanish Princess… and exciting new series like the recently debuted crime drama Hightown from producer Jerry Bruckheimer that is resonating with our subscribers. These will be followed by the sexy and spirited comedy series Run The World from Dear White People’s Yvette Lee Bowser and Leigh Davenport, the family drama Heels, set in the world of small town wrestling, and the next two highly-anticipated series in our expanding Power Universe franchise, Ghost & Raising Kanan. As we end the first full year of our international expansion, I’m pleased to report that we have launched in 50 countries ahead of schedule and exceeding our subscriber targets. That growth is driven by a slate of Starz originals, first run and library features and best-in-class acquisitions that make up an attractively priced, “best of global SVOD” content offering for consumers… positions us as a complementary premium tier to other OTT services… and allows us to align ourselves with top distributors from Amazon to Apple, Roku to Orange, Airtel to TotalPlay, augmented by the STARZPLAY app already live in 8 countries, as we continue our march toward our target of 15 to 25 million international subscribers by 2025. Recent additions like Tony McNamara’s The Great, starring Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult, Normal People, based on the best- selling book, and the award-winning anthology series The Act, combined with an anticipated ramp up of our local productions, will continue to diversify our slate and differentiate our platform. 4 Jon Feltheimer’s Analyst Call Remarks Final We’ve charted this course, funded it out of our own free cash flow, our growth is on schedule and outsized value creation is within our sights. Turning to our Motion Picture Group, we pivoted quickly during the quarter, showing the kind of strength & agility that has transformed us into a top five domestic box office market share leader. When theatres shut down two days into the release of the Erwin Brothers’ I Still Believe, we immediately repositioned the film to launch in an exclusive premium video on demand window with structured price points, including a special Easter promotion, followed by an early debut on packaged media, electronic sell- through and traditional video-on-demand to mitigate its lost theatrical revenue. When theatres re-open, we will be ready. Our slate is stocked with big brands & properties like Spiral, the Saw-reimagining, The Hitman’s Bodyguard 2, starring Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson and Salma Hayek, and John Wick 4. It is deep in comedies like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, starring Nicolas Cage, and Barb & Star Go To Vista del Mar, starring Kristen Wiig. It includes the horror thriller Antebellum, starring Janelle Monae, the Dean Taylor-directed Hilary Swank thriller Fatale and the Neil Burger-directed sci-fi feature Voyagers. And it has uplifting stories for our times, like the Erwin Brothers’ inspiring American Underdog: The Kurt Warner Story. 5 Jon Feltheimer’s Analyst Call Remarks Final And though our feature film production operations have been paused, the process of refilling our pipeline with exciting blue-chip properties has not. During the quarter we landed the movie rights to Judy Blume’s iconic bestseller Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, the first time one of her books has been brought to the screen, added two-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett to the cast of Borderlands, and won an auction for 16 States, the zombie thriller to be directed by Evil Dead’s Fede Alvarez. Obviously our theatrical production & release schedules are caveated by the uncertainties in the movie business right now -- questions about when production will resume, what kind of protocols we will need to put in place, when theatres will re-open and how moviegoer habits will change. But we address all of these issues with an agile, data-driven and forward-looking film business that continues to extend and expand our biggest franchises, collaborates with our talent to create bold, original new properties, and brings to all of our distributors a uniquely diverse and flexible slate. Turning to television, we shut down nearly 20 series and pilots virtually overnight when the pandemic hit. But we repositioned ourselves quickly, keeping casts and crews safe, shifting our focus from production to development and setting up over a dozen virtual writers’ rooms to keep talent engaged. We have already seen a significant uptick in backup script orders for pilots and current series, paving the way for our productions to shift into high gear when it’s time to restart. 6 Jon Feltheimer’s Analyst Call Remarks Final The resonance of our premium content continues to open doors with new buyers. On the heels of our partnership with HBO Max on Love Life, they will launch our docu-soap The House of Ho on July 16, ordered two more production pilots, and picked up the first television series from our Point Grey partnership, the Christmas-themed adult animated comedy Santa Inc., featuring the voices of Seth Rogen & Sarah Silverman.