International law firm CMS has advised All3Media, an international television, film and digital production and distribution group, on its acquisition of Silverback Films, a leading independent producer of landmark natural history series.
Founded in 2012, Silverback Films creates high quality and award-winning wildlife content for both television and cinema. Its recent documentary David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet enjoyed a worldwide theatrical release in September 2020, becoming the widest-ever documentary release in British cinema history, before its global launch on Netflix.
Netflix chose Silverback Films to produce its first landmark natural history series, Our Planet, a four-year collaboration with WWF (The Worldwide Fund for Nature). The Emmy-award winning series, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, is Netflix’s globally most watched original docu-series of 2019 and its only natural history series to be included in its global top 10 most watched – 45 million homes tuned in during the first four weeks.
Forthcoming Silverback projects include A Perfect Planet, a unique fusion of blue chip natural history and earth science which explains how our living planet operates. This five-part landmark series for BBC1 and Discovery will be premiered in 2021 and will show how the forces of nature – volcanoes, sunlight, weather and oceans - drive, shape and support Earth’s great diversity of life.
All3Media comprises more than 40 production and distribution companies across the UK, Europe, Asia Pacific and the USA. In the past year, All3Media has produced over 3,000 hours of content that has been broadcast and distributed across multiple platforms and territories.
Jamie McIntyre-Brown, General Counsel at All3Media, comments: “We are delighted that Silverback is joining All3Media. The CMS team provided invaluable support and, once again, demonstrated a deep understanding of the media sector coupled with pragmatic corporate advice at every stage of the process.”
Paul Guite, CMS Corporate partner and Co-head of Media, adds: “Silverback Films is a leader in its field and we are proud to have worked with All3Media on this acquisition. Our team has extensive experience advising media companies on corporate transactions, enabling us to offer clients the support they need on strategic transactions of this nature.”
The CMS team was led by Paul Guite and included Lauren Wood and Lyndsey Shaw (Corporate), Victoria Gaskell, Laurel O’Dell and Louise Keenan (Media), Mark Joscelyne and Robert Sartor (Tax), Andrew Quayle and Stacey Callaghan (Share Incentives), Laura Lobb and Emily Matthews (Employment) and Sophie-Jennifer Pyle (Real Estate).
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