Founding family abandons plan to take Village Roadshow private

Cinema and theme park company Village Roadshow has announced that a proposal by the company’s founding family to take the business private has been abandoned.

John and Robert Kirby, the sons of Village Roadshow founder Roc Kirby, announced on 10 August that they were considering taking the company private in a joint bid with Graham Burke, the company’s managing director.

Between them, the trio control around 61% of the company’s shares and a deal to buy out the remaining shareholders would have cost between $70-90 million.

But the deal has been called off. Village Roadshow said in a statement released to the ASX this morning that the trio had been unable to arrange finance for the deal on terms that were acceptable to Village Roadshow.

“The board of Village will consider alternative capital management strategies in due course,” the company said in a statement.

Roc Kirby founded Village in the 1950s and built the company from its humble roots as a drive-in theatre operator into one of Australia’s largest cinema companies. In the last two decades the company has expanded into theme parks (it owns Movie World and Sea World on the Gold Coast) and film production (hits include The Matrix films and Oceans series).