Play It Again, Boys

Harvey Weinstein has a perfect ending in mind for Miramax Films, the company he and his brother Bob were forced to leave behind in 2005 when they departed the Walt Disney Co. after 12 colorful years. In Harvey's final scene, the two snag back the name from the media giant, which has turned Miramax into a déclassé, financially diminished Mouse brand. Harvey, the brash movie mogul who helped spin the low-budget indie-film trade into a booming business, doesn't need more wealth. And he's not pushing for another Academy Award. He won the hardware in 1999 for producing Shakespeare in Love, and he has marketed pictures that have scored nearly 60 other Oscars. But Miramax holds special meaning for the brothers primarily because it was named after their mother Miriam and their deceased father Max. That's about as sentimental as Harvey gets. At Disney his brawls with filmmakers and show-biz executives made almost as many headlines as his shrewd, aggressive handling of such quirky hits as The Crying Game, Pulp Fiction and Chicago.

"We're different now, and so we're doing something completely different," says Harvey. While they would love to reclaim the old name, one thing the Weinsteins don't want back is the old film-business model. "We've already done a movie company. Today we're in the business of providing content and our own distribution pipelines."

The siblings are heading a new entity called simply the Weinstein Co., which sounds relatively unflashy, although its grand ambitions dwarf anything the pair did at Disney. Movie production and acquisition still form the backbone, but the Weinstein Co. is positioned more as a diversified boutique media company encompassing home video, cable television, Broadway theater, book publishing, video games and, of course, the Internet. With dozens of projects under way, the Weinsteins estimate that they'll break even next year, turn a profit in 2008 and probably launch an IPO by the decade's end.

If so, it will mark the brothers' third financial bonanza in show business, the first taking place when they sold their struggling indie-movie company to Disney in 1993 for $70 million. After bristling for years under the control-freak management of former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, they ended the bitter final chapter of their Miramax reign on an up note. "After we signed our final contracts, we took all the Disney lawyers to a three-hour, raucous, rollicking dinner," recalls Harvey.

The boys had good reason to celebrate. They got not only an estimated $130 million in goodbye bucks but also fabulous parting gifts: shared distribution rights to completed pictures, brother Bob's lucrative Dimension Films label, sequel rights to (and split proceeds from) 15 movies, including Scary Movie, Scream and Spy Kids. The Weinsteins had both capital and content--starting anew but not a start-up, says Bob.

Investors have thrown money at them. They amassed a $1.2 billion bankroll, including $500 million through a debt sale and the remainder via 32 investors ranging from fellow entrepreneurs like Internet billionaire Mark Cuban and carpet kingpin Julian Saul to hedge funds and financial firms, including Wellington Management and Fidelity Investments. Declares Harvey: "We now have the ability to buy a company for a billion dollars."