Screen Media Parent Chicken Soup For The Soul Entertainment Acquires 1091 Pictures In $15.6M Indie Combo

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, whose subsidiaries include specialty film distributor Screen Media, is acquiring 1091 Pictures.The purchase price of $15.55 million consists of $8 million in cash, $2 million in the form of newly issued shares of Series A perpetual preferred stock and 375,000 shares of Class A common stock.In addition to creating a bulked-up specialty film distributor, the deal will advance Chicken Soup’s streaming progress.

The company is among the leaders in ad-supported streaming, operating Crackle, Popcornflix and other services. It bought Screen Media in 2017 and plans to combine 1091 with that existing business unit.The roughly 4,000 movies and TV series in the 1091 vault range across many genres.

Included are acclaimed documentaries like The Ghost of Peter Sellers, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice and A Kid From Coney Island; Taika Waititi’s early-career indies What We Do In The Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople; crowd-pleasers like The Last Blockbuster and Pharma Bro; and UFO stories Close Encounters of The Fifth Kind and The Phenomenon.The output from 1091, estimated to be 300 titles a year, will feed not only the film distribution apparatus but also the company’s streaming outlets.

Screen Media is already the primary supplier to the ad-supported networks under its own corporate tent.Also coming aboard in the deal are 1091’s free, ad-supported TV networks and AVOD channels, which draw about 1 billion yearly ad impressions.Sony founded 1091 as a film and TV subsidiary of The Orchard in 2015.