Miramax CEO Bill Block to Exit This Week as the Company Seeks New Creative Directions
Bill Block, who has been CEO of Miramax since April 2017, will not be given a contract renewal once his term expires on Tuesday, Deadline is reporting. The move seems a bit surprising, considering how Block has been able to successfully shift the entire company’s strategy over the past few years, and has not been given any additional context.
Since he took over, Block has transformed the business that once was built on the company’s library to generating new content, sometimes based on that pre-existing IP, though not always. Titles like the new Halloween trilogy emerged from that, along. with Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya, Guy Ritchie’s latest films, The Gentlemen (as well as the tie-in upcoming Netflix series), Operation Fortune, and Wrath of Man, or Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, which just sold to Focus Features at Toronto for around $30M.
According to Deadline, since Block took over, Miramax has been able to double the revenue and nearly quintupled its profits, which is why his exit sounds all the more strange. The trade speculates that it may be tied to yet another 180-shift on the company’s strategy, despite what seemed to be working. Of course, it hasn’t all been a box office success story — going no further, their films with Guy Ritchie came and went at the box office completely unnoticed.
TheWrap also weighed in on the topic, citing an insider who said the company wants to focus more on their IP, and to push for that new creative direction, they were seeking new leadership. The headlines have also come out a few days after news broke that Malek Akkad’s Trancas International Films, which co-owns the film rights to the Halloween franchise with Miramax and has sole ownership of the TV rights, is shopping the franchise around, with multiple interested bidders. According to Bloody Disgusting, A24 and Miramax would be leading the charge. One Take News also added that Paramount Global is very interested and prepared to draw the big bucks (we assume for the film rights). Apparently, this comes a few months after Akkad actively pursued the idea of a six-episode series set in the continuity of Halloween III.
Miramax is owned by beIN (51%) and ViacomCBS (49%).
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
