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Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Westbrook Inc. are in talks to be taken over by the anonymous media company run by former Disney executives Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs, people familiar with the deal said. The Hollywood reporter.
With the Smiths ‘Westbrook Inc., Mayer and Staggs’ media business would gain access to the production studio, Westbrook Studios, behind films like king richard and TV series like Red table talk and Cobra Kai, as well as Westbrook’s digital arm, Westbrook Media, which sold 12 shows last year, including one Fresh Prince of Bel-Air special reunion on HBO Max and a docuseries featuring Alicia Keys on YouTube.
Mayer and Westbrook declined to comment.
Westbrook Inc., which was launched in 2019 and is led by CEO Kosaku Yada and President Tera Hanks, is said to be the second large-scale deal for a media company run by Mayer and the Staggs company. In August, Hello Sunshine from Reese Witherspoon, the company that produced The morning show and Big little lies and operates the Reese’s Book Club – sold to the unnamed company in a deal valued at $ 900 million.
Mayer and Staggs’ media company has at least $ 2 billion in backing from private equity giant Blackstone. Upon the sale of Hello Sunshine, Joe Baratta of Blackstone said in a statement that “the growing demand for high quality content is one of the most compelling investment themes for our business.” The limited company is also in talks to acquire Imagine Entertainment, the production company of Brian Grazer and Ron Howard.
Earlier this year, Mayer and Staggs’ company attempted to combine Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings and Ben Silverman’s Propagate Content, but Ithaca Holdings was eventually sold to South Korean entertainment group HYBE.
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