How Sir Peter Jackson got to have his billion dollar exit cake and eat Hollywood too

As the dust settles on one of New Zealand’s biggest exits, the $2.2 billion deal for Wētā Digital is now described by stock analysts as “bananas” and “terrible” for purchaser Unity Technologies.

The mega-deal’s unwinding
late last year, just two years after the ink had dried, avoided a scourging of The Shire and left Sir Peter Jackson and other Wētā Digital shareholders with both the billions in sale proceeds as well as continued control of the lucrative Wellywood film empire.

The scale of the deal, and wildly divergent outcomes for buyer and seller, appears equivalent to Telecom’s 2007 $2.2b sale of Yellow Pages. That telephone directory business went on to experience near-terminal decline and resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for purchaser the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

Wētā FX, with Jackson as majority shareholder and independent of Unity, was set up at the time of the deal to hive off bread-and-butter screen special-effects work said to generate more than $200 million in annual turnover. Five-sixths of Wētā’s 1500-strong workforce ported over to the new entity to allow for business-as-usual at the Miramar-based effects house.

At the Academy Awards last month Wētā kept up its habit of basking in the limelight when its work on War is Over! secured a statuette for best animated short, while its contributions to Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 landed a nomination for best visual effects.

The phoenix-like new entity secured full independence from Unity in December after paying $170m for a perpetual licence to software it had developed in-house and sold as the centrepiece of the 2021 deal. It had previously been contractually obliged to make at least $70m in annual payments to Unity.

New York-based stock analyst Martin Yang, who tracks Unity for Oppenheimer & Co, said the final washup left the gaming software company wallowing in red ink.

“They sold a perpetual licence of all those rights to Wētā FX for a bit over US$100m ($170m). Terrible deal-making on Unity’s part, considering that they paid US$1.6b for Wētā Digital. Bananas indeed,” he said.

One film industry source familiar with Wētā’s operations said even inside the company many were scratching their heads at developments over the past two years.

“It seems like Unity gave Peter a billion dollars, and then just walked away,” they said.

Requests this week by the Herald for comment to Jackson and Wētā FX went unanswered.

While Wētā has seemed to enjoy smooth sailing in the two years since the deal was struck, Unity has struggled. Its share price has declined by more than 80 per cent since the acquisition (possibly hitting Jackson and his fellow Wētā shareholders in the back pocket as one-third of the 2021 purchase price was paid in company stock) and has had to weather a storm of consumer outrage over proposed user charges.

In early October its long-time chief executive John Riccitiello abruptly resigned. Weeks after his departure, Unity took the first steps to unwind the Wētā deal and a month later it shuttered the remnants of Wētā Digital. Wētā FX said in a press release at the time it would seek to re-employ the 265 staff laid off as a result.

In January, Unity announced it would be laying off a further 1800 staff, a quarter of its global workforce, as it struggled towards reporting its first profit since being founded two decades ago.

Yang said when the deal was struck that Unity would commercialise Wētā’s software tools and make them available for its own users in game and metaverse development but these plans did not seem to make any significant progress.

“It’s fair to say that the product vision was never realised, and was not even close in terms of execution. The progress has been way slower than what management projected at the time of acquisition,” he said.

While Yang said the collapse of the deal was undoubtedly a loss for Unity – “I’ve definitely heard the word disaster mentioned,” he said – both the purchase, and the unwinding, hadn’t triggered movements in its share price.

“An average investor or Unity shareholder wouldn’t understand how hard it can be to convert tools that have been long-established in film production workflow, [into] tools for video game production workflow,” he said.

Yang said Unity had recorded acquiring US$668m in intangible assets – Wētā’s software – as part of the deal, but had since written that down by US$200m and he expected more impairments to follow.

”In reality, other than selling that perpetual licence to Wētā FX, I don’t think there’s an alternate way to monetise that asset,” he said.

By contrast, the deal with Unity capped a remarkable turnaround for Jackson, who over the past few decades has become a major player in Hollywood, Wellington and the Beehive.

After achieving worldwide fame and building a local film empire off the back of the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, and convincing successive governments to provide his sector subsidies totalling hundreds of millions of dollars, the mogul had endured a relatively fallow period largely spent producing niche projects and documentaries.

Prior to the Unity sale Jackson had pulled back from extracurricular activities, including turning off funding taps for a legal challenge to Wellington’s Shelly Bay development, and in 2019 had to seek external capital for Wētā Digital – by far the largest operator in Wellywood – and sold a quarter of the company to Napster founder Sean Parker for $100m.

Parker is understood to have been a key player in engineering the sale to Unity, which saw his $100m investment turn into a $600m payday in just two years, and he retains a significant stake in Wētā FX.

Since the Unity deal, which secured Jackson and his partner Dame Fran Walsh $1.4b and returned them to Forbes’ ranks of global billionaires, he was not only able to redouble opposition to the Shelly Bay development but had finance available to achieve total victory by buying the site outright. He has since added to his wide-ranging real estate empire that is now worth more than $350m.

Matt Nippert is an Auckland-based investigations reporter covering white-collar and transnational crimes and the intersection of politics and business. He has won more than a dozen awards for his journalism – including twice being named Reporter of the Year – and joined the Herald in 2014 after having spent the decade prior reporting from business newspapers and national magazines.