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MCV has been informed that Imaginarium studios is in financial trouble. The creative studio was co-founded by Andy Serkis and has contributed performance capture to some of the biggest movies of recent years, includingRise of the Planet of the Apes, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
According to our initial source, the company lost 1.2m in 2015 and 3m in 2016, and a recent cancelled project has meant that immediate action is required to secure the future of the business.
The Imaginarium Studios’ founders Andy Serkis and Jonathan Cavendish stated today that they are in the process of concluding a management buy-out, following differences in the forward creative strategy for their company with their institutional investors.
Recently the studio has moved into games production, with Battlefield 1 and Star Citizen both on its list of credits. It’s not clear to us whether the whole operation is in financial trouble or just the gaming operation, but we can’t see any reason for their to be a significant division between the two.
The studio entered into a partnership with Creative England at the beginning of last year. With an aim to find up and coming development talent and‘developing and curating new games across multiple platforms’ with a plan to release five to ten titles in its first 12 months.
Imaginarium stated that they will be continuing to build on the slate of 3 movies they have recently produced –Breathe, The RitualandThe Jungle Book– all of which will be released worldwide over the next 12 months. In addition, they confirmed a mature slate of film and TV projects which they will be taking forward into production.
Martin Alltimes’ Imaginati company is continuing to develop aPlanet of the Apesgame (as confirmed by Andy Serkis at Comic Con in 2016) which the new Serkis-Cavendish company will publish this autumn under license from 20th Century Fox.
Further announcements regarding the new company and the projects will follow shortly.
