It's a kind of magic
Changing the culture
It was headhunters from Los Angeles who persuaded Peter Urie to return to the business arena and take on the challenge of restoring the fortunes of Metrodome. ‘It had done well as a distribution company and floated on AIM in 2001,’ he recalls, ‘but it bought too many high-risk feature films that lost money, and it also lost money on internet ventures.’ TV Loonland, a German-based children’s animation group sold by its founder Peter Volckler in 2000, had by then bought an 83 per cent stake in Metrodome in an acquisition spree that left Loonland with £20 million debts. Urie soon decided what he had to do. ‘I told them I would have to join the Loonland board and work to dilute their stake. My other condition was that I must run Metrodome as though it was mine.’
Michael Bream, Loonland’s Austrian principal shareholder, decided to back Urie and he became corporate development officer of the German group. Urie was pleased to find most of the existing Metrodome staff ‘excellent’ and the personnel changes he made mostly involved changing who did what and clarifying the management structure.
‘I wrote a new business plan and got both the banks and staff enthused,’ he reflects.
‘The company had been trawling for one big hit — like cult favourite Donny Darko — and investing 70 per cent of its revenues in high-risk foreign-language films,’ with only 30 per cent going into home entertainment projects, which were ‘much steadier cash producers.’
Urie insisted the company should reverse these proportions. ‘I put 70 per cent into home entertainment and only 30 per cent into theatrical release films.’ He claims an ‘almost immediate’ hit with last May’s investment in Flight 99, a film about the New York World Trade Center attack. ‘We paid £40,000 and it will make us £500,000,’ he brags.
Metrodome projects are also winning respectable positions in the film rental charts. Urie has, meanwhile, stopped Metrodome selling future rights for cash and set up a division to market its films, ensuring future revenues come to the company. Urie claims to ‘bridge the cultures’ between the ‘creative people’ and the ‘suits’, and says it has been ‘absolutely vital to carry people with me.’ Since his arrival, the RBS banking group took shares instead of fees in a fundraising, which cut Loonland’s proportionate stake to 71 per cent.
All these changes saw Metrodome make an interim loss, but that should be reversed before long. Urie’s plan is now to raise more money from institutions to acquire film rights overseas, in mainland Europe, Canada and Australia, and reduce Loonland’s stake further.
He says two factors have helped him in turning Metrodome round. ‘I can speak to producers in their own language’ and ‘Michael Bream is an investor, not a controller, and he is supportive as long as he sees the business grow well.’
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