At center: Steven Mnuchin
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Former U.S. treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin has added to his stake in Lionsgate, which now totals nearly $50 million, including last year’s purchases.
In a securities filing Thursday, an equity fund controlled by Mnuchin disclosed a 7.9 percent stake in Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.’s Class A voting shares. That’s a step up from the 5.5 percent holding in the Hollywood studio first acquired by Mnuchin’s fund in fall 2023 for about $30.8 million.
A Lionsgate spokesperson declined comment on Mnuchin’s latest stock accumulation, part of share purchases revealed in the regulatory filing by Liberty Strategic Capital, a private equity fund led by Mnuchin and which has no ties to John Malone’s Liberty Global.
Mnuchin raising his stake in Lionsgate comes as the major studio presses ahead with plans to separate its TV production and Motion Picture Group divisions and a 20,000-title film and TV library from Starz. Lionsgate has already unveiled plans to back into a Special Purpose Acquisition Company, or SPAC, to create a separately traded public company with a $4.6 billion enterprise value.
Mnuchin is no stranger to Hollywood. Before becoming U.S. Treasury Secretary, he had a major slate financing deal with Warner Bros. as part of his partnership with subsequently disgraced producer-director Brett Ratner and billionaire James Packer, dubbed RatPac-Dune Entertainment.
Before that, he was co-chairman of Relativity Media but extricated himself from the studio before it filed for bankruptcy in 2015. Dune also had a long-running slate financing deal with Fox that saw Mnuchin invest in critically acclaimed features like Black Swan and 127 Hours. (Mnuchin’s wife, Louise Linton, is a writer, director and actress, with her 2019 film, Me You Madness, selling to STX.)
Mnuchin has backed films like Dunkirk and Wonder Woman, and also picked up a credit on the Zack Snyder Cut of Justice League.
