Slate financing pooled $15 billion from Wall Street firms to fund film catalogs

Evidence

In the years before the Great Recession, Wall Street capital flooded into Hollywood. Whereas the studios had typically relied on passive, revolving lines of credit from banks before, funds were now designed for PE firms, hedge funds, and investment banks to actively participate in financing smaller catalogs of films. An estimated $15 billion was pumped into “slate financing,” in which a series of films (upwards of twenty-five) were produced from the same pool of capital, thereby diversifying the risk and return. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 297

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines slate financing concretely: a pool funding a series of films to diversify risk and return.
• XREF: This is the reader’s core financial instrument (securitization-like risk pooling) to trace into Hollywood output.