By Lori Perkins
Third Times a Charm is NOT the name of the new production company started by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. It’s Artists Equity and hopes to produce visual media that will partner with creative participants and continue to pay-out on the back end, a model recently developed by Jason Blum’s horror company, Blumhouse.
If you remember Damon and Affleck had partnered with Warner Brothers for a 10 year production deal under Pearl Street Production (they closed this now and will give Warner Brothers some sort of first look at new material). In 2000, they founded LivePlanet, a multimedia company that ran the HBO contest documentary series “Project Greenlight.”
Affleck, no stranger to do-overs with his second-chance-at-love romance with Jennifer Lopez, said that streaming has changed the revenue stream for visual media and that artists should participate in profits all along the process.
The idea for Artists Equity recalls United Artists, which was founded in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith as a way to exert greater control over their creative and financial destinies.
The new company plans to release three projects in 2023 (the first about the creation of AirJordans, which Damon wrote). After that they hope to create five films a year. Let’s hope at least one of them is a romance, perhaps even a second-chance-at-love!