Lionsgate Invests in Pilgrim Studios

SANTA MONICA: Lionsgate has made a strategic investment in Craig Piligian's Pilgrim Studios, the outfit behind shows like Ghost Hunters and Wicked Tuna.

The independent studio has not disclosed the size of its investment in the unscripted outfit, whose slate encompasses almost 50 shows across 27 networks. Craig Piligian will continue to run Pilgrim as CEO.

"We're delighted to be in business with Craig Piligian and his team, who have achieved remarkable success building Pilgrim into a global leader in unscripted content with a valuable portfolio of long-running returning series and reality brands," said Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer. "This transaction scales and diversifies our television business by aligning Pilgrim, the market leader in nonfiction programming, with our robust scripted production operations as well as our premier syndication business operating under the Debmar-Mercury banner."

"We're thrilled to become part of the Lionsgate family and align ourselves with Jon Feltheimer, Kevin Beggs and the rest of an incredible team that has built a world-class organization," said Piligian. "This deal creates tremendous synergies between our companies, including the benefits of our respective relationships in the industry and the strength of Lionsgate's worldwide distribution infrastructure; we're very excited to work together to accelerate the next phase of our growth."

"Pilgrim's brand is synonymous with highly original, top-quality content, and we're excited to welcome Craig and his team to the Lionsgate family," added Kevin Beggs, Lionsgate Television Group's chairman. "The alliance of our television assets accelerates our growth into an unscripted content business with tremendous upside and creates a whole that is even greater than the sum of its parts."