John Flock

World Screen Weekly, October 25, 2007

President and COO

Peace Arch Entertainment Group

In a Canadian media industry marked by consolidation this year, the growth path of Peace Arch Entertainment Group has certainly caught people’s attention. A relative unknown outside of Canada just two years ago, Peace Arch made a splash in the U.S. TV market with its acclaimed production The Tudors for Showtime, went on to make several library acquisitions and this summer rolled out its first theatrical release, Delirious, on select screens in the U.S.

“The company has grown so rapidly in the last two years in terms of the number of people, the revenues and the different business lines we’re in,” says John Flock, Peace Arch’s president and COO.

Based in the Los Angeles office, Flock is directing Peace Arch’s film and television businesses, utilizing his experience as an entertainment attorney and producer and his expertise in film financing from his time working at Cinefinance. He joined the company to head up its Los Angeles office in May 2004, a time when, he admits, the focus for the then-struggling firm was on “staying alive.”

The company put a number of direct-to-video titles into production and then received a boost in August 2005 when industry veterans Jeff Sagansky, Kerry McCluggage and Drew Craig made a $2-million investment in the firm. “I think what they saw at the time was as a Canadian-based film-and-television company with a public listing, no debt, and a couple of guys who knew how to get movies made and sold. Once they came on board, they brought a certain amount of credibility to Peace Arch and that allowed Gary [Howsam, Peace Arch’s CEO] and I to grow the business really quickly.”

Flock notes that the company has been able to expand its production slate of direct-to-video titles, and make several strategic acquisitions, including the Canadian home-entertainment business KaBOOM! Entertainment, giving it a foothold in the family and kids’ business. Peace Arch also acquired Castle Hill Productions for its 500-title library, syndication operation and its expertise in limited U.S. theatrical releases.

The most recent acquisition has been that of Trinity Home Entertainment, a U.S. DVD distributor. As part of its growth strategy, Peace Arch also hired the former Lakeshore executive Julie Sultan to drive its international film-sales efforts and CHUM Television International’s Kevin Byles and Victor Rodriguez for the worldwide TV-distribution front. “Our whole strategy is to become a North American distributor and an international sales company,” Flock says. “We have an awful lot of direct-to-video and television product that we sell, most of which we’ve been producing ourselves. As the sales team has built a stronger reputation, we’re now taking on third-party projects. At Sundance this year we got into the acquisitions game, picking up completed films and completed television programming.”

Flock is particularly optimistic about being a home-entertainment player in the U.S. market via the Trinity acquisition. “We’ll get them six titles a month [to distribute.] Two or three will be ours and three or four will be from other producers. I know that overall growth in the market is small, but for us it is a small business that we will quickly build into a medium-sized business. We’re not going to be competing with the studios, but there’s a niche business there for this kind of product.”

And Flock doesn’t rule out other acquisitions, given Peace Arch’s position in the market, which allows it to target operations that may be considered too small for the majors or even larger independents to look at. “There are private companies out there doing what we do, there aren’t a lot of public companies who do it. The only one that is really vertically integrated the way we are that comes to mind is Lionsgate. It creates opportunities for us to acquire these privately held companies. We have access to product, we have international sales, we have a library, we’re television as well as film, so we give these private businesses an opportunity to expand and take their equity in their private company and convert it into equity in a public company. That gives them an exit strategy and a much broader canvas with which to work.”

These new opportunities are also giving Flock a new canvas to work with. “We don’t have the baggage of a major studio. We don’t have an existing paradigm that we’re forced to operate within. We want to make a mini-series, we make one. We want to release a movie theatrically, we’ll do it. People ask me, ‘What are you looking for in terms of content?’ The answer is, whatever we like that we can make money on. It’s an exciting time to be here. We really feel like we’re on the first rung of the ladder in terms of the growth of the company.”

—By Mansha Daswani