Billionaire Wang Jianlin’s Dalian Wanda Group announced Tuesday that it’s acquiring the Hollywood studio Legendary Entertainment, whose recent box office hits include “Jurassic World” and “Interstellar”.
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The deal was “China’s largest cross-border cultural acquisition to date”, said the firm.
Chinese companies, many of them inexperienced but cash-rich, are on a buying spree overseas for assets that can speed their development and help them expand in global markets.
“The acquisition of Legendary will make Wanda Film Holdings Company the highest revenue-generating film company in the world, increasing Wanda’s presence in China and the USA, the world’s two largest markets”, Wang said in a statement. The company’s projects – which have also included Pacific Rim and the latest Batman trilogy – are mostly the big-budget action spectaculars popular with Chinese audiences.
Under the deal announced on Tuesday, Wanda said it will buy an unspecified majority stake in Legendary. It said in a January 7 report that total revenue is forecast to rise another 25 percent this year.
Chinese companies invested $11 billion in the United States over the past year, according to data gathered by Derek Scissors, a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
The personal fortune of Wang, who is also chairman of Wanda, stood at $32.4 billion as of Friday, according to Bloomberg Billionaires. Last February, Wanda paid $1.2 billion (1 billion euros) for Swiss sports management company Infront Sports & Media.
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“Government soft power belongs to another sphere”, he said at the briefing, where he and Legendary chairman and CEO Thomas Tull watched lawyers sign the agreement. Together, Wanda and Legendary will create a completely new worldwide entertainment company.
