EXCLUSIVE: This year has seen a swath of global production and distribution entities in film and television impacted by layoffs and cuts, and Vice Media Group has been no exception. Following the company’s much-publicized bankruptcy in 2022, when it was sold for $350 million to hedge fund and former investor Fortress, the group underwent a raft of layoffs and restructuring earlier this year, with its production business, Vice Studios Group, now being led by Jamie Hall in London and Danny Gabai in Los Angeles.
But Hollywood loves a comeback, and Vice Media CEO Bruce Dixon tells Deadline in a rare interview that Vice is back from the brink in a smaller capacity but with a clear vision and money to spend — the latter in the form of an imminent production finance facility, which it hopes to launch before the year end.
“There’s no doubt that the business is far healthier than it was a year ago,” says Dixon. “One of the things I want to focus on is obviously culture and morale – it’s a tough industry to be in at the moment but we’re feeling positive because we have become a far more agile company.”
The Vice chief says he expects the company to be in profit in Q1 2025. “We’re smaller, we take opportunities where we can now and, more importantly, we’re backed by our investors and our board in terms of looking for opportunities for growth and exciting projects.”
Today, the company is operating at 30% of its size compared to the beginning of the year. Dixon says this leaner operation – and particularly its global production entity Vice Studios Group, which is behind projects such as Gangs of London, the Saoirse Ronan feature film Bad Apples, Netflix doc Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now and upcoming hybrid musical/doc Pavements – means it can better adapt to the changing market. Key to this, Dixon says, will be the introduction of a production finance facility, which it is currently at the “advanced stages” of securing.
The London-based exec says he was recently in LA working on securing the production facility which will, he says, help propel the company’s strategy to move its studio business into a “more IP-based” content business and will enable it to be a “one-stop studio shop.”
“We were forced to be a camera for hire for so long and that had more to do with our corporate resources than anything else,” says Dixon. “So, being able to break through what we went through in a much-publicized bankruptcy, we’re now focusing on the positives of being in the content business.”
He continues: “We’re recognizing that we’ve always had that skillset, but we’ve just never had the financial capability to go out and be the super studio – which we have all the skills for, but we’ve never been able to put something up front on projects and get involved at earlier stages. That’s somewhat hindered us. It hasn’t hindered our creativity, but it’s hindered our output and our ability to improve margins and be a more successful financial business.”
Vice Studios Group co-president Gabai notes that with streaming services and many premium cablers “moving away from a world where they do all-rights buyouts,” the introduction of a facility will better enable Vice to compete on a global scale for content via co-financing agreements or co-productions. “We do so much global production in the UK and other territories that, for us, it feels like there are more opportunities for windowing,” he says. “There’s an opportunity for a studio player out there who can really step into that role and fill the gap on productions that may be launching out of the UK, or other territories, and we can give them that extra piece of resource that they would need to go into production.”
While Dixon couldn’t reveal any more details about numbers or timing on the finance facility, he did indicate that he was hopeful it will launch “before the end of the year.”
“It’s something that is a priority for us and we hope to close it soon,” he says. “But it will allow us to have more possibilities as a company and allows us to be a little more opportunistic in our ideas, while also bringing more certainty around the projects we are doing.”
‘Gangs of London’
Vice Media Group, which moved out of the online news game earlier this year, has trimmed down to focus on its Virtue ad agency and Vice TV, a joint venture with A&E, in addition to its studio business. Meanwhile, Vice Digital, a culture hub publishing content on and around Vice’s platforms, which Dixon notes was a “massive financial burden for us,” has since relaunched under a new joint venture with Nashville-based Savage Ventures.
Vice Studios Group
In the company’s tumultuous 18 months, one bright spot has been its global production business Vice Studios Group, which has a distribution catalogue of more than 1,000 hours and oversees five premium production entities: Pulse Films, UnTypical, Vice Studios LatAm, Vice Studios Canada and a news documentary unit. By the end of 2024, the group expects to have produced 21 projects including Pulse Films-produced Pavements, from director Alex Ross Perry, and Sky Original and Pulse Films series Atomic, starring Alfie Allen and Shazad Latif, the latter of which wrapped in Morocco last summer.
The company is currently shooting the third season of British crime drama Gangs of London (seasons 1 & 2 launched on Netflix in September as part of a wide-ranging deal with AMC Networks) and also premiered Jason Pollard-directed doc Ol’Dirty Bastard: A Tale of Two Dirtys at the UK’s Doc’n Roll Film Festival. Vice Studios and Viral Nation recently announced the development of unscripted series Montana Boyz (working title), about TikTok cowboys Kaleb Winterbrun, Mark Estes and Kade Wilcox.
“This will be the largest production year we’ve ever had, which is crazy when we are coming out of a bankruptcy,” says Gabai. “We’ve had this happen with all of the headwinds going on around us and a really tough marketplace, but now those headwinds are behind us.”
Gabai notes that he and fellow Co-President Hall had previously restructured the studio business when Vice Studios and Pulse merged a few years prior to the bankruptcy. “I think, to some extent, the studio has been operating with the benefit of a very tightly knit group of people for a couple of years,” he says.
The manifesto for the studios business is to focus on director-driven talent: “We tend to work with really great filmmakers and, oftentimes, if they’re not already huge household names when we start working with them, they tend to grow into big names off the back of doing projects with us.”
This year, Vice reunited with its Fyre documentary director Chris Smith for Devo, a doc about the band of the same name which launched in Sundance earlier this year. It is also producing Hollywood Ending, from Tiger King director Rebecca Chaiklin, via its UnTypical strand, which follows the downfall of Zach Horwitz, the charismatic “midwestern, millennial Madoff” who ran a $690M Ponzi scheme under the noses of those closest to him. The latter was picked up by Amazon MGM.
“I used to say in my agent days that talented people are always talented,” says Gabai. “Whether somebody’s having a hot moment or a cold moment or they’re making a million things at once, or they haven’t worked for a couple of years – if someone is really talented and attacks their projects in an interesting way, that’s somebody we want to bet on.”
‘Pavements’
It was this vision that ultimately led Vice Studios to bringing aboard Listen Up Philip director Ross Perry to helm Pavements, a documentary/fiction hybrid about the venerable U.S. indie rock band Pavement fronted by Stephen Malkmus. Pavement is best known for songs such as “Cut Your Hair” and “Stereo,” which they released through Matador Records.
The Pulse Films-produced project, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last month and is having its UK premiere at the London Film Festival today, intimately shows the band preparing for their sold-out 2022 reunion tour, while simultaneously taking the audience behind the scenes of the making of a musical, a museum and a spoof Hollywood biopic, featuring Jason Schwarzman as Matador Records founder Chris Lombardi and Joe Keery as Malkmus.
Matador Records and Pavement were keen to do something “totally different” says Gabai, and he says that “this felt like a good opportunity to take the piss out of a standard music documentary.”
“Alex was the top director on my list and Stephen seems like the character that Alex would have written about and created,” says Gabai.
For Ross Perry, he was drawn to the “big, structural conceit of the film: “I just thought this movie should take place in a world where Pavement are as worthy of every form of tribute as say, the Rolling Stones, The Beatles or David Bowie because, for a few 100,000 people, that’s true,” he says. “In the spirit of the band, we wanted to put this whole endeavor in quotation marks, in the way they put the idea of being a successful band in quotations.”
Pavements, says Gabai, is a prime example of the kinds of projects Vice Studios will aim to back going forward. “It’s always filmmaker first for us. Everything we do is driven by the filmmaker or the showrunner or the core creative on any project, what they want to do with the material on that project and what they want to say about this crazy world that we live in while doing it in a way that is fun and entertaining.”