In a major reshuffle that insiders said had been on the cards for a while, Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) chairman and CEO Tony Vinciquerra will step down from his CEO role and SPE chairman of global television studios Ravi Ahuja will become president and CEO, effective January 2, 2025.
Vinciquerra will stay on in an advisory role for SPE as non-executive chairman until the end of December 2025. Ahuja will report to Sony Group Corporation chairman and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida and Sony Group Corporation president, COO and CFO Hiroki Totoki.
In interviews on Monday, Vinciquerra anticipated “chaos” in the next couple of years due to consolidation and the push towards streaming profitability, which he has said before he is confident will be achieved.
Vinciquerra joined SPE in June 2017 and has presided over five consecutive years of increasing profit. He expanded the company’s film slate, sold or shut down most of the 110 cable networks under his purview, and resisted the urge unlike every other Hollywood major to build a general streaming platform.
Instead he turned SPE into a key strategic supplier of film and television to the streamers, while also developing the company’s genre-based streaming business with the acquisition of the Crunchyroll anime platform in 2021.
Under Vinciquerra’s watch, SPE and Apollo Global Management bid for Paramount Global, only to withdraw their offer in August when it looked increasingly likely that the Skydance Media merger proposal would eventually win out.
Vinciquerra also oversaw Sony’s acquisition of Alamo Drafthouse. He recently told the Financial Times Business of Entertainment Summit in Los Angeles, ”They have 4.5million people in their loyalty programme. Producing television and film, we don’t have direct contact with our customers. We now have access to understand what people are looking for.”
Ahuja joined SPE in 2021 to oversee all production businesses for Sony Pictures Television (SPT) and the studio’s India business as chairman of Global Television Studios. SPT and its production companies produce shows like The Crown, The Boys, Better Call Saul, The Last of Us, The Night Agent, and American Idol.
Ahuja has also overseen SPE’s M&A activities, including the acquisitions of Industrial Media, the UK’s Bad Wolf and VFX company, Pixomondo, as well as the sale of GSN Games to Scopely. Prior to Sony, he was president of business operations and CFO of Walt Disney Television.
Yoshida said the “extraordinary turnaround at SPE over the last 10 years” would not have been possible without Vinciquerra, adding: “Under Tony’s watch, SPE became a critically important part of our efforts to maximise the value of our IP and find synergies across all our entertainment and technology businesses, and it remains a key driver in Sony Group’s ongoing corporate strategies to lean further into the creative and entertainment spaces.”
No comments yet