Shareholders have finally gotten an official date for when they are to vote on the decision to separate Lionsgate Studios from Starz. Lionsgate announced that a special meeting will be held on April 23rd to allow the shareholders to vote. Lionsgate will allow shareholders from the date of March 12 to cast their ballot at this meeting. 

Lionsgate first initiated its separation from the Starz Film and TV Studio business back in 2023, but obstacles have prevented the separation from becoming official. Lionsgate CFO James Barge spoke out about the numerous conflicts at the Morgan Stanley media conference. Revealing, “We didn’t know there would be a pandemic, writer strikes and then, somewhere along the way, we made a fantastic acquisition of eOne. So there have been quite a few things.” Barge went on to confirm that Liongsgate is on track to separate, “for a mid to late April close.” 

The reason behind the separation is “all about valuation,” Barge explains, “we don’t feel as a combined company that we’re getting the valuation. We look like a conglomerate media company in the space that is competing with … the Comcasts and the Disneys, when in reality Starz is a completely unique business, totally misunderstood.”

This came shortly after Lionsgate acquired a deal with the AI research company Runway in September 2024. According to the Deadline article covering the matter, “The new AI is designed exclusively to help Lionsgate Studios, its filmmakers, directors and other creative talent augment their work by generating cinematic video that can be further iterated using Runway’s suite of tools.” 

The separation comes at a time where a number of studios are going in similar directions as Lionsgate. Comcast recently created a standalone company consisting of NBCUniversal cable networks, a solution to “relieve the main company’s balance sheet of declining linear assets and offer potential strategic opportunities.” Similarly, Warner Bros. Discovery restructured its network earlier this year to try and create separation from its “linear TV holdings” and its other content. 

Barge commented on those changes by explaining, “You’re seeing a lot of people in the industry starting to segregate out their linear business,” but  stated that Starz does not fit the linear description. According to Barge, Starz is “digital first”, and with 70% of their revenue from digital this year, we could take Barge’s claims at face value.