EDITORIAL: “What Went Wrong With Hasbro’s Acquisition of Entertainment One?”
In 2019, excitement aroused analysts of show business when two of the largest non-major companies in show business came together. Entertainment One, an entertainment empire that owned record, film, video and television divisions in Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Australia and America, which had a hand in Amblin Partners, producers of Best Picture winner “Green Book”, and which had been home to such popular television franchises as “Criminal Minds”, “Designated Survivor”, “The Rookie” and “The Walking Dead”, was coming under the umbrella of Hasbro, who made the defining cartoon of the 2010s (“My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic”), and almost every single toy or non-video game you grew up with that wasn’t made by Mattel, from “My Little Pony” to “G.I. Joe” to the “Transformers” to “Mr. Potato Head” to “Operation” to “Connect Four” to “Clue” to my personal favorite, “Monopoly”.
With all that power under one roof, you may be wondering to yourself, “How did Hasbro treat the biggest acquisition it made using all the cash it made from the success of a series that gained and had a way of keeping a loyalty among an audience that stretched well beyond its originally-intended demographic of little girls?”
I’ll tell you.
Poorly is how.
What did Hasbro want eOne for anyway?
Apparently, all Hasbro wanted eOne for, more than anything else in the world, was a franchise that I once saw a clip of, a clip that was powerful enough for me to define the show by it. “Peppa Pig” is a British cartoon about a pig who does very uneventful things and then tells the camera exactly what she did and also tells the audience about things that are visible to the camera. The writers and directors and animators of the series are apparently under the impression that their audience has a case of blindness that is so severe that it would make Stevie Wonder green — or is that pink? — with envy. Needless to say, I’m way more in the “Bluey” camp as far as the two prominent preschool franchises are concerned — that series is better written, wittier, more impactful and far more respectful of its larger audience.
Yet the mere fact that more families (at least in this decade) are interested in, and more regularly view, an Australian cartoon with a higher value of entertainment, and with far broader appeal, than “Peppa Pig” seems to be of no concern to Hasbro, whose suits are hyper-focusing on the cartoon, with a series of theme parks and a resort and what seems like a no-tomorrow pump-out of YouTube-oriented episodes that all look the same, and ultimately intend to only keep that and other eOne Kids & Family properties. For what it’s worth, the biggest market “Peppa Pig” has scored (outside of England and America) is the ever-oppressive People’s Republic of China. Make of that what you will.
What was Hasbro doing the rest of the time?
When Hasbro wasn’t milking “Peppa Pig” for all her worth, it was . . . severely downsizing Entertainment One. A layoff of 10% of the company’s staffers was made in early 2021; during the summer, eOne’s music arm, home to a number of classic Black music catalogs (namely that of Brunswick Records) and the “Hampster Dance” that I remember from when I was little, was sold to a hedge-fund called the Blackstone Group and became the MRNK Music Group.
What really seems to have been the death knell for eOne — as far as Hasbro’s care about anything related to it except for “Peppa Pig” — was Hasbro’s closure of its theatrical arms in Canada and Spain in 2022 and subsequent restructure of its Family & Brands assets into Hasbro’s own merchandising and licensing arm. In Canada alone, the social media accounts of eOne have been running on empty since July 2022.
What is Hasbro doing with it now?
Hasbro recently announced a sale of what was left of eOne (its film and television assets, which now appear to be on life support) as part of a plan to “focus on strategic investment in key franchise brands”. Game show owner Fremantle and superhero movie production house Legendary Entertainment were among the interested buyers, but it was announced earlier this month that all of it will go to Lionsgate in a deal that will close later this year. In preparation for this, last month, Hasbro killed off eOne’s British distribution offices and laid off much of the staffers it employed in a film market where it once had the largest distribution share.
What will Lionsgate do with eOne now?
My belief is that Lionsgate will rid the entire world of eOne altogether, with all of its film and television assets being folded into the Canadian firm, which has started to release critically-acclaimed films again even if the returns on “John Wick: Chapter 4” are the only things Lionsgate has to show for that. There is a fleeting possibility that Lionsgate might revive eOne’s name for a new subsidiary handling some selected titles from the catalog; the company revived Vestron Video’s name for Blu-ray titles and the Vidmark name for a Roku app.
Conclusion
In my opinion, Hasbro’s ownership of Entertainment One has served as a prime example of a large corporation making very poor use of the assets it has acquired and also of the same corporation making billions from a franchise that found a great many adults in its audience and poorly using those billions. Hasbro had absolutely no experience with having owned a large media company and certainly had no clue as to how to run one.
Layoffs and selloffs seemed to be the order of the day for Hasbro when it wasn’t churning out cartoons from a pig that seemed to get a kick out of explaining the obvious to an increasingly-less-captive audience, and eOne also could only produce one major hit in its UK and Canadian markets (“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves”). Whatever other big hits eOne could have scored in its relevant markets (“The Woman King”, “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts”) ended up in the hands of other firms. And a once-prominent Canadian, British, Dutch and Australian distributor that looked like it was about to be king of 21st-century show business when it went to Hasbro is now almost out of oxygen on its way to Lionsgate.
The stories surrounding Hasbro’s tenure of eOne have been devastating to watch for anyone with even a remotely vested interest in the global film market. It’s sad to see what became of the company that made several successes on screens big and small and on the independent and established-artist music scene, get horribly decimated by a toymaker whose only desired item out of its purchase was someone who was, in more than one way, a cartoon pig.
