‘Gangs of London’
Finance
Vice Bosses Talk Next Steps Following Bankruptcy And Tease New Production Finance Facility That Will Make It A “One-Stop Studio Shop”
EXCLUSIVE: This year has seen a swath of global production and distribution entities in film and television impacted by layoffs and cuts, and Vice Media Group has been no exception. Following the company’s much-publicized bankruptcy in 2022, when it was sold for $350 million to hedge fund and former investor Fortress, the group underwent a raft of layoffs and restructuring earlier this year, with its production business, Vice Studios Group, now being led by Jamie Hall in London and Danny Gabai in Los Angeles.
But Hollywood loves a comeback, and Vice Media CEO Bruce Dixon tells Deadline in a rare interview that Vice is back from the brink in a smaller capacity but with a clear vision and money to spend — the latter in the form of an imminent production finance facility, which it hopes to launch before the year end.
“There’s no doubt that the business is far healthier than it was a year ago,” says Dixon. “One of the things I want to focus on is obviously culture and morale – it’s a tough industry to be in at the moment but we’re feeling positive because we have become a far more agile company.”
The Vice chief says he expects the company to be in profit in Q1 2025. “We’re smaller, we take opportunities where we can now and, more importantly, we’re backed by our investors and our board in terms of looking for opportunities for growth and exciting projects.”
Today, the company is operating at 30% of its size compared to the beginning of the year. Dixon says this leaner operation – and particularly its global production entity Vice Studios Group, which is behind projects such as Gangs of London, the Saoirse Ronan feature film Bad Apples, Netflix doc Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now and upcoming hybrid musical/doc Pavements – means it can better adapt to the changing market. Key to this, Dixon says, will be the introduction of a production finance facility, which it is currently at the “advanced stages” of securing.
The London-based exec says he was recently in LA working on securing the production facility which will, he says, help propel the company’s strategy to move its studio business into a “more IP-based” content business and will enable it to be a “one-stop studio shop.”
“We were forced to be a camera for hire for so long and that had more to do with our corporate resources than anything else,” says Dixon. “So, being able to break through what we went through in a much-publicized bankruptcy, we’re now focusing on the positives of being in the content business.”
He continues: “We’re recognizing that we’ve always had that skillset, but we’ve just never had the financial capability to go out and be the super studio – which we have all the skills for, but we’ve never been able to put something up front on projects and get involved at earlier stages. That’s somewhat hindered us. It hasn’t hindered our creativity, but it’s hindered our output and our ability to improve margins and be a more successful financial business.”
Vice Studios Group co-president Gabai notes that with streaming services and many premium cablers “moving away from a world where they do all-rights buyouts,” the introduction of a facility will better enable Vice to compete on a global scale for content via co-financing agreements or co-productions. “We do so much global production in the UK and other territories that, for us, it feels like there are more opportunities for windowing,” he says. “There’s an opportunity for a studio player out there who can really step into that role and fill the gap on productions that may be launching out of the UK, or other territories, and we can give them that extra piece of resource that they would need to go into production.”
While Dixon couldn’t reveal any more details about numbers or timing on the finance facility, he did indicate that he was hopeful it will launch “before the end of the year.”
“It’s something that is a priority for us and we hope to close it soon,” he says. “But it will allow us to have more possibilities as a company and allows us to be a little more opportunistic in our ideas, while also bringing more certainty around the projects we are doing.”
Vice Media Group, which moved out of the online news game earlier this year, has trimmed down to focus on its Virtue ad agency and Vice TV, a joint venture with A&E, in addition to its studio business. Meanwhile, Vice Digital, a culture hub publishing content on and around Vice’s platforms, which Dixon notes was a “massive financial burden for us,” has since relaunched under a new joint venture with Nashville-based Savage Ventures.
Vice Studios Group
In the company’s tumultuous 18 months, one bright spot has been its global production business Vice Studios Group, which has a distribution catalogue of more than 1,000 hours and oversees five premium production entities: Pulse Films, UnTypical, Vice Studios LatAm, Vice Studios Canada and a news documentary unit. By the end of 2024, the group expects to have produced 21 projects including Pulse Films-produced Pavements, from director Alex Ross Perry, and Sky Original and Pulse Films series Atomic, starring Alfie Allen and Shazad Latif, the latter of which wrapped in Morocco last summer.
The company is currently shooting the third season of British crime drama Gangs of London (seasons 1 & 2 launched on Netflix in September as part of a wide-ranging deal with AMC Networks) and also premiered Jason Pollard-directed doc Ol’Dirty Bastard: A Tale of Two Dirtys at the UK’s Doc’n Roll Film Festival. Vice Studios and Viral Nation recently announced the development of unscripted series Montana Boyz (working title), about TikTok cowboys Kaleb Winterbrun, Mark Estes and Kade Wilcox.
“This will be the largest production year we’ve ever had, which is crazy when we are coming out of a bankruptcy,” says Gabai. “We’ve had this happen with all of the headwinds going on around us and a really tough marketplace, but now those headwinds are behind us.”
Gabai notes that he and fellow Co-President Hall had previously restructured the studio business when Vice Studios and Pulse merged a few years prior to the bankruptcy. “I think, to some extent, the studio has been operating with the benefit of a very tightly knit group of people for a couple of years,” he says.
The manifesto for the studios business is to focus on director-driven talent: “We tend to work with really great filmmakers and, oftentimes, if they’re not already huge household names when we start working with them, they tend to grow into big names off the back of doing projects with us.”
This year, Vice reunited with its Fyre documentary director Chris Smith for Devo, a doc about the band of the same name which launched in Sundance earlier this year. It is also producing Hollywood Ending, from Tiger King director Rebecca Chaiklin, via its UnTypical strand, which follows the downfall of Zach Horwitz, the charismatic “midwestern, millennial Madoff” who ran a $690M Ponzi scheme under the noses of those closest to him. The latter was picked up by Amazon MGM.
“I used to say in my agent days that talented people are always talented,” says Gabai. “Whether somebody’s having a hot moment or a cold moment or they’re making a million things at once, or they haven’t worked for a couple of years – if someone is really talented and attacks their projects in an interesting way, that’s somebody we want to bet on.”
‘Pavements’
It was this vision that ultimately led Vice Studios to bringing aboard Listen Up Philip director Ross Perry to helm Pavements, a documentary/fiction hybrid about the venerable U.S. indie rock band Pavement fronted by Stephen Malkmus. Pavement is best known for songs such as “Cut Your Hair” and “Stereo,” which they released through Matador Records.
The Pulse Films-produced project, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last month and is having its UK premiere at the London Film Festival today, intimately shows the band preparing for their sold-out 2022 reunion tour, while simultaneously taking the audience behind the scenes of the making of a musical, a museum and a spoof Hollywood biopic, featuring Jason Schwarzman as Matador Records founder Chris Lombardi and Joe Keery as Malkmus.
Matador Records and Pavement were keen to do something “totally different” says Gabai, and he says that “this felt like a good opportunity to take the piss out of a standard music documentary.”
“Alex was the top director on my list and Stephen seems like the character that Alex would have written about and created,” says Gabai.
For Ross Perry, he was drawn to the “big, structural conceit of the film: “I just thought this movie should take place in a world where Pavement are as worthy of every form of tribute as say, the Rolling Stones, The Beatles or David Bowie because, for a few 100,000 people, that’s true,” he says. “In the spirit of the band, we wanted to put this whole endeavor in quotation marks, in the way they put the idea of being a successful band in quotations.”
Pavements, says Gabai, is a prime example of the kinds of projects Vice Studios will aim to back going forward. “It’s always filmmaker first for us. Everything we do is driven by the filmmaker or the showrunner or the core creative on any project, what they want to do with the material on that project and what they want to say about this crazy world that we live in while doing it in a way that is fun and entertaining.”
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Within the global manufacturing industry, maintaining a competitive edge requires a delicate balance between driving internal efficiency and fostering strong external relationships. For Applied Materials, a leader in materials engineering solutions for the semiconductor industry, this challenge became the foundation for a strategic finance transformation program, with an SAP Taulia solution emerging as a key enabler.
The journey began in early 2019 with the launch of Agile Finance, an end-to-end transformation initiative designed to support the company’s aggressive growth trajectory, which included a goal to double in size. The initiative was built around three strategic pillars: enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the finance organization, promoting career fulfillment, and establishing a robust digital operating model. The impact was significant, with the finance function achieving approximately 35% productivity gains in its labor force.
The third pillar—the move to a digital operating model—is where the partnership with SAP Taulia began.
“The SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution was introduced not merely as a cost-cutting measure, but as a strategic tool to transform and digitize the interaction with Applied’s extensive, global supplier base,” Junaid Ahmed, corporate VP, Finance at Applied Materials, says. “We understood that to reap the benefits of digitization, we had to ensure the suppliers were on board. It needed to be a win-win outcome.”
Unprecedented flexibility for suppliers
The program empowers suppliers—thousands of them worldwide—to self-select which approved invoices they wish to discount for early payment. This is not a continuous, all-or-nothing commitment but rather a decision made on an invoice-by-invoice basis. This flexibility allows suppliers to manage their working capital needs with greater precision, taking advantage of early payment during their own critical periods, such as quarter-end or year-end, to help meet their own financial targets.
The system also drastically improves transactional efficiency. Suppliers no longer have to call Applied to track invoice status, approval, or payment date. All this information is available 24/7 in the SAP Taulia solution, reducing resource allocation on both sides and ensuring both reap the benefits of moving to an integrated, digital system.
Strategic benefits for Applied Materials
For Applied, the program is a testament to its focus on balancing efficiency with strong supplier relationships. The philosophy is a “win-win” built on a crucial spread: Applied Materials, as a Fortune 500 company with strong cash flow, has a significantly lower cost of capital than many of its suppliers. By funding the discounts, Applied captures a return—the discount income—while offering its suppliers funding at a rate close to their cost of capital, but with greater convenience.
This relationship-focused approach is critical. Applied’s supplier account managers actively support the program because they recognize its mutual benefit, not viewing it as a finance mandate to push costs onto the supply base.
Furthermore, the “dynamic” nature of the discount rates is a powerful risk mitigation tool. Unlike fixed contractual discounts, the rates can be adjusted in response to global economic changes, such as shifts in interest rates. When interest rates rose after the pandemic, Applied was able to adjust the discount rates accordingly with minimal pushback, as the core proposition remains the valuable spread between the parties’ cost of capital.
The SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution has been rolled out globally, giving all suppliers the opportunity to use it. This has been critical over the last 12 months as many businesses around the globe have been subject to new and often unexpected tariff costs impacting their margin and their liquidity.
“The flexibility of the solution means suppliers can access funds when they need them, which helps them navigate some of the economic uncertainty that many businesses are facing,” Dirk Holoubek, managing director, Finance Shared Services, explains. “2025 saw a 23% increase in usage of the discounts, reflecting the pressures that suppliers are feeling right now on their cash flow.”
The solution’s capability to drive sophisticated analytics is also a major strategic asset. It helps provide insights into the different costs of capital between Applied and its supplier base. This data allows for targeted outreach and communication, ensuring that the offer of capital support is proactively extended to the suppliers that need it most.
The strategic value of the solution is further cemented by its ownership. The acquisition of Taulia by SAP brings several advantages.
“Trust is really important to both us and our suppliers,” Ahmed says. “For our suppliers to adopt a new solution, they need to know its technology they can rely on in the long term. Being part of SAP creates that assurance in the long-term future of the program.”
Looking forward, Applied Materials is already focused on the next stage of the transformation project: Agile Finance 3.0, which is focused on enabling the organization to become AI-first. The company is deploying a global, organization-wide AI assistant to drive personal productivity, but the strategic application of AI in the supplier management space is even more profound.
AI is expected to transform decision-making enablement by analyzing critical information and communicating effective options. In the future, AI will be able to proactively assess the specific needs and attributes of the supplier base, enabling Applied to address issues more quickly and resolve them earlier. The benefits are already tangible in e-invoicing: AI has made the solution more flexible and “human-like,” capable of reading minor changes in invoice format that would have previously caused electronic errors. This reduced rigidity and increased flexibility are directly contributing to the overall efficiency of the digital operating model.
By leveraging the SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution, Applied Materials has not only digitized a process but also strategically transformed its financial operations, creating a system that is agile, resilient, and focused on maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with its global supplier ecosystem.
Cedric Bru is CEO of SAP Taulia.
Finance
Houston budget amendment would give financial assistance to help those impacted by a trash fee
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Houston City Council could soon consider whether to offer financial assistance to help those who may struggle to afford a proposed trash fee.
This month, council will approve a budget. In it, Mayor John Whitmire doesn’t increase taxes.
However, he does want to charge a $5 monthly fee to cover trash services. A plan to help close the city’s nearly $200 million deficit that doesn’t add up to some.
Speaking in front of council on Wednesday, Super Neighborhood 64 president Lindsay Williams brought more than concerns, she had numbers surrounding the mayor’s proposed $5 monthly trash fee.
A plan his team says could climb to $25 a month by 2032. If it does, Williams told council that $300 annual cost would be just .15% of a $200,000 income.
For someone making $15,000, it’s two percent. “More than 13 times the burden for the same trash, same truck and same fee, but not the same pay,” Williams explained.
However, Controller Chris Hollins said the mayor’s not being truthful about the real cost.
“Houstonians are not stupid,” Hollins said. “We should not treat Houstonians like they’re stupid.”
Hollins said the cost may need to be $40 a month. Whitmire didn’t respond to Hollins during the meeting when he asked if he plans to increase the fee.
No matter the cost, some council members want to offer financial relief. Right now, there are no exceptions.
However, an amendment council will consider from Council Member Alejandra Salinas next week would change that.
“If they for whatever reason met the threshold and need an additional need because of the administrative fee, our amendment would allow them to apply for funds through the water fund,” Salinas said.
The trash fee wasn’t the only item from the mayor’s seven and a half billion dollar budget proposal that sparked debate. Hollins said a plan to divert money away from water utilities could drain a billion over the next five years from infrastructure money.
Whitmire disagrees saying there’s more than enough funds to handle the change, and continue with projects.
“We’ve all admitted the budget’s not perfect, but certainly it’s a first start that Houstonians understand and it’s a shame it’s being so politicized because it’s literally people’s lives and death,” Whitmire said.
Council will vote on amendments next week. It has to have a new budget in place by the end of the month.
Copyright © 2026 KTRK-TV. All Rights Reserved.
Reader question: My spouse has little interest in our financial position. As we age, this concerns me. I try to share some basic information (income, spending, account balances, debt, and so on) each month but rarely get a response. I think graphs or charts might be of more interest to her than a bunch of numbers. What recommendations would you have for illustrating our financial position so that I am not the only person aware of how we are situated? Thanks!
Answer: Your situation is pretty common. Most couples I know develop a division of labor over time, where one person is in charge of financial matters and the other person is less involved. That’s definitely the case for my husband and me. He’s in charge of paying all the monthly bills and preparing our tax returns, but the financial planning and investment decisions are up to me. This type of arrangement might work well for a long time, but can become less sustainable with age, particularly if the “finance person” in the relationship dies or develops a major health issue.
Online tools and mind maps
Illustrating your financial situation with charts and graphs is a great idea that might help your spouse become a little more involved. Morningstar’s Portfolio X-Ray tool includes a variety of images that help illustrate your financial situation. Websites for most major brokerage firms also include some visual tools. Schwab, for example, offers a Portfolio Checkup and a bar graph illustrating your account’s monthly income from dividends and interest income. Vanguard has a Portfolio Watch tool and a variety of performance illustrations, tools, and calculators.
A mind map, which we used with clients when I worked for a financial advisory firm, can be another way to picture your entire financial situation on one page. There are various softwaretemplates for drawing a mind map, or you can simply sketch it out with a large sheet of paper and a pencil. Start with your names at the center of the page. Then draw spokes connecting to various categories, such as names of other family members; investment accounts; real estate and other assets, insurance policies, estate plans, key goals and values, and contact information for accountants, estate planners, and other professionals. It can be helpful to go through the mind map together and make any updates needed at least once a year.
Other ways to communicate about money
A few other ideas—though not related to charts and graphs—might also be useful.
I like the idea of putting together a net worth statement that itemizes cash, taxable accounts, real estate, retirement accounts, and debt for each member of the couple as well as items owned jointly. It’s a good idea to update this document at least once a year and discuss it as a couple. If you set up the document as a spreadsheet, you can include columns with additional information such as account numbers, what each account is used for, which accounts are subject to required minimum distributions, or tax issues like potential capital gains.
Many couples also put together a binder (sometimes humorously called a “Doomsday Book”) that contains information about where to find important paperwork, insurance policies, how bills are paid, what each account is for, steps the surviving spouse will need to take, final wishes, and any other critical information.
A well-qualified financial adviser can bridge the information gap
Finally, you could consider working with a good financial adviser, who can help involve your spouse in financial matters while you’re still living and step in to fully manage investments and personal finance decisions if you pass away before your spouse. Make sure the adviser holds the Certified Financial Planner designation and charges fees that are reasonable. Although a 1% fee is still the industry standard for accounts of $1 million or less, it’s possible to find advisers who charge significantly less, including a few who price their services based on hours worked instead of a percentage of assets under management.
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This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance.
Amy C. Arnott, CFA, is a portfolio strategist for Morningstar and co-host of The Long View podcast.
Related links:
What If This Turns Out to Be a Terrible Time to Retire?
https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/what-if-this-turns-out-be-terrible-time-retire
Bill Bengen: ‘Inflation Is the Greatest Enemy of Retirees’
https://www.morningstar.com/retirement/bill-bengen-inflation-is-greatest-enemy-retirees
3 Big Questions to Ask Your Aging Parents
https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/3-big-questions-ask-your-aging-parents
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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