I said I’d go easy on Imagination Park Entertainment (IP.C), formerly Geonovus Entertainment, formerly Geonovus Marijuana, formerly Geonovus Resources… because, hey, everyone deserves a chance to reset.
Last year, this company was a rolling punchline, with news releases promising the moon and A-list celebrities and giant Hollywood partners – all of which came to a screeching halt when Lions Gate reportedly asked management to quit name-dropping them, and the whole A-list star thing ended up being a small piece of the back end on a Steven Seagal straight-to-video flick.
Turns out a business plan of giving stock to producers in return for future film profits doesn’t work so well when, really, no film ever makes a profit on paper in Hollywood. Ever. The Tim Burton-made Batman film, once the highest grossing ever, apparently never made an actual on-paper profit. Because when people do back end deals, you get your accounts to kill the back end.
Then there were the deals to buy the music catalogue of an investor’s band for $400k, and the rights to his vertical growing technology and..
So, okay, reset. New blood comes in, changes the name (to a name owned by the CEO in return for a fee okay let’s not go there again moving on thanks nothing to see here) and says it’s going to be all different now. A tilt at virtual reality would be coming. A big push in the markets and a big push creatively.
Okay, so show me what you’ve got, Imagination Park.
Imagination Park Entertainment announced yesterday that it had been signed to produce a new music video for DJ duo sensation Dmitri Vegas and Like Mike.
I..
Yeah.
Okay, I’m not so big on the DJ scene. Maybe these guys are the biggest of the big. I mean, according to the Imagination Park news release:
CEO and Director Colin Wiebe said, “As a musician, I am thrilled Imagination Park has the opportunity to work with one of the biggest musical acts in the world right now.”
Really though?
According to the duo’s Wikipedia page, the pair are admittedly big in Belgium, but elsewhere? They once had something get to the Top 30 in the UK, which is nice. They once broke the Top 100 in France and once cracked the Top 40 in Austria.
‘Biggest musical acts in the world’ though? I’d suggest they’re not even one of the biggest musical acts in Ibiza.
A couple of days ago, the company announced it was shooting a virtual reality short film that would be a sequel to an existing short film. Okay. And a bit before that it announced it had bought the rights to make a feature film based on another short film. Sure.
Look, I’ve worked in the film business and know how hard it is to turn a short into money. And I know how easy it is to get the rights to make a feature film out of a short that hasn’t been optioned in the two years ago since it was made. And I know you don’t make fortunes making music videos for Belgian DJs.
There’s definitely money to be made in film production. Lots of Vancouver production companies make millions doing movies of the week and reality TV pilots and the like. But they don’t make short films on spec.
So what’s the move here? Where’s the company maker? And why is every project drenched in this ‘biggest in the world’ bullshit?
Perhaps the last line of the Stockhouse write-up on this news release puts it best:
Currently there are 11.07m outstanding shares with a market cap of $387,600.
That’s down $111,000 from the last news release.
— Chris Parry
http://www.twitter.com/chrisparry
FULL DISCLOSURE: The author was a consultant for Geonovus Marijuana. Oh, sweet Uruguayan memories..