Content Partners Expands With New Credit Investing Division Led By Banking Veteran Alphonse Lordo

Content Partners, the big independent owner of studio films, TV and related participations has launched Content Partners Capital, a new division headed by entertainment investment banker Alphonse Lordo to offer private capital for entertainment businesses and IP assets.

CPC is targeting IP-heavy business models across film, TV, and music and will invest under various credit structures to accommodate a company’s capital needs. Lordo will oversee origination and portfolio management of private credit opportunities in what Content Partners calls a natural evolution of its business leveraging decades of investing experience in the content space.

“Content Partners is launching CPC at a seminal moment in the entertainment industry with a unique combination of capital and strategic partnership,” said co-founder and CEO Steve Kram. “While we continue to experience significant growth with our transactional IP investment strategy, we’re excited to now step into the next chapter of film, TV, and music sector investment: providing the capital and strategic partnership to help businesses grow.”

CPC’s first operation was providing debt financing to Media Capital Technologies to support its film slate transaction with Lionsgate.

Lordo, previously managing director and head of entertainment at Truist Securities, said the logic behind CPC was twofold — Content Partners had reached critical mass and was ready to build out a new platform; and there’s a real need for private capital in deals under $100 million. “Banks have funding issues, and they have regulatory pressures. Enter private credit to kind of help stretch beyond what a bank can do for clients,” he tells Deadline.

“As we assessed the marketplace, for any type of deal structure, there were not a lot of credible private capital providers in that kind of $10 million to $100 million range, and we thought that was a void that we could fill.”

“We know the IP very well. We know the business models very well. We understand them. We know the risk fit, and we know the players … and thought no one’s doing this in a way that’s partnership oriented, that’s here to provide monetization for IP plus growth capital for producers, distributors, catalog owners, investment firms who are buying catalogs, investment firms that are doing co-finance and slate deals” and need incremental capital.

Content Partners owns the rights to or interests in over 500 films and 3,000 hours of television. Its library of film titles from 13 Going on 30 to Black Hawk Down, Black Swan and Hugo represents more than $33 billion of worldwide box office revenue.

In TV, the firm co-owns the CSI television franchise. One of its big recent transactions was acquiring the entire 400-episode catalog of true-crime unscripted series Forensic Files. 

The LA-based investment firm has owned Revolution Studios since 2014.

Content Partners was founded in 2006 by Kram and Steven Blume and is now the worldwide leader in acquiring film, television programming, music and related royalties. It buys the assets from investors, producers, writers, directors, actors and musicians, targeting assets that are generating cash flow and have long term distribution deals with major studios, networks, publishers and other channels. It’s deployed well over a billion dollars in this marketplace since launch.