Business Desk

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

HOLLYWOOD


PARAMOUNT PICTURES TO BUY DREAMWORKS


Viacom’s Paramount Pictures agreed to buy DreamWorks SKG for about $774 million, wresting the movie studio away from NBC Universal and securing the talents of Steven Spielberg. With DreamWorks, Paramount will increase its slate of films for 2006 to as many as 16, including movies that will be produced by Mr. Spielberg. To pay for the purchase, which includes about $826 million of debt, Paramount plans to sell DreamWorks’s library of titles for as much as $1 billion, the companies said yesterday.


The purchase is a coup for Paramount chief Brad Grey, hired this year by the chairman of Viacom, Sumner Redstone, to revive the studio. Paramount, ranked sixth at the box office this year, won DreamWorks with an 11th-hour bid that beat General Electric’s NBC Universal. DreamWorks founders, Mr. Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen are handing over a business formed 11 years ago with a vision of creating a film, animation, and music powerhouse.


Paramount is “looking to shake things up and muscle things up,” the director of entertainment and media research at the Boston-based Yankee Group, Adi Kishore, said. Talks to sell DreamWorks’s film library of 59 movies including “Gladiator” to private equity buyers are “advanced” and a sale may fetch between $850 million and $1 billion, the chief executive officer of Viacom, Tom Freston, said yesterday.


– Bloomberg News


IN BRIEF


Sources say ConocoPhillips is in serious negotiations to buy Burlington Resources, an oil and gas producer, for more than $30 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site last night … The Federal Reserve may say monetary policy is no longer stimulating the economy after it raises interest rates today for the 13th time, more than half of Wall Street’s biggest bond trading firms say … Saudi Arabia joined other members from the OPEC in saying the group should maintain current production to meet demand during the winter … Walt Disney Co.’s “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” opened as the no. 1 film in America and Canada, the second-best December debut ever.


– Bloomberg News

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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