BeIN directs attention to film with Miramax purchase

Miramax, the film studio behind Hollywood classics such as Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love and The English Patient, has been sold to the Doha-based beIN Media.

The deal, for an undisclosed sum, marks beIN’s transition from a sports television brand to a general entertainment company.

Miramax was founded by brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein in 1979 and named after their parents.

Its heyday was in the 1980s and 1990s, when it defined the independent-film scene and had a string of cross-over hits, including Sex, Lies and Videotape and The Crying Game.

It was sold to Disney in 1993, though the brothers remained with the company until 2005, but left to set up the Weinstein Company when Disney refused to distribute Michael Moore’s anti-George Bush film Fahrenheit 9/11.

Miramax still owns the titles to more than 700 films, including 68 Oscar winners.

The company’s releases in 2016 will include Bridget Jones’s Baby and Bad Santa 2.

BeIN is run by the Qatari executive Nasser al-Khelaifi, who said he expected to use Miramax and its assets to expand in entertainment and content production. Miramax has recently invested in and co-distributed projects such as The Wedding Ringer and Mr Holmes, some of which are based on scripts or films bought from Disney.

Disney sold the film studio to a consortium of investors led by Colony Capital and including the Qatar Investment Authority in 2010 for $660m (£466m). The owners began looking at options including a sale last summer, when a $1bn price was mooted.

Although the sale price to beIN was not disclosed, Colony’s founder, Thomas J Barrack, Jnr, yesterday said that, thanks to online streaming, it had “successfully returned our partners’ capital many times over and safeguarded the passion, dedication and hard work of the library’s true artistic masters”.