‘Ender’s Game’ Is a Bet for Gigi Pritzker’s OddLot Entertainment

Now, Gigi Pritzker, an heiress who produces movies, is poised to expand her company atop the one that got away from Warner.

The film version of “Ender’s Game” is set for release on Nov. 1 by Lionsgate’s Summit Entertainment unit. A tale of violent interplanetary warfare, it is intended to extend the young adult line of those recently merged studios, whose blockbusters, “The Hunger Games” and the “Twilight” films, have had about $4 billion in worldwide ticket sales.

But “Ender’s Game” was actually built by Ms. Pritzker’s OddLot Entertainment.

OddLot, founded in 2005, is tiny, with only about a dozen employees who operate from warehouse-style space near the Sony Pictures studio here. It picked up the pieces when Warner’s rights to Mr. Card’s book expired, and four years ago, it began assembling its most expensive movie to date, with a production budget of more than $110 million.

Along the way, “Ender’s Game” has become part of an expansion that could soon put OddLot, though still a boutique, in Hollywood’s top flight of equity-backed production companies. Those include Participant Media, which is owned by the Web entrepreneur Jeff Skoll, and provided backing for “Lincoln”; Legendary Entertainment, which was founded by the investor Thomas Tull and is making “Man of Steel” and “Pacific Rim” for Warner; and Annapurna Pictures, which has made another heiress, Megan Ellison, a player in the current awards season, with films like “Zero Dark Thirty” and “The Master.”

Successes like those, Ms. Pritzker said, suggest there is a path that can lead from small, and almost accidental, adventures in the film business to something resembling a major enterprise.

“It’s only in looking back that you see, maybe there was a pattern,” Ms. Pritzker said by telephone from her home in Chicago on Wednesday. “I’m very opportunistic by nature,” she added.

This week will find Ms. Pritzker at the Sundance Film Festival. She and a pair of OddLot co-presidents, Bill Lischak and Michael Nathanson, will bring with them a comedy, “The Way, Way Back,” starring Steve Carell, which is both in the festival and for sale to potential distributors.

The outing will also be a test run for the new partnership between the two co-presidents. Mr. Lischak, an accountant and a former president of the independent company First Look Studios, has been with Ms. Pritzker for about six years. Mr. Nathanson, hired in November, previously served as president of MGM Pictures and production president of Sony’s Columbia Pictures unit.

Mr. Nathanson, speaking jointly with Mr. Lischak in an interview last week, said he initially contacted OddLot about investing in “Ender’s Game,” which he had once hoped to buy while at MGM. Instead, he enlisted as part of the executive team at OddLot. He was drawn to the people there, he said, because they seemed refreshingly undaunted by the crosscurrents in a turbulent film business.

“They’re all running into it, not away from it,” Mr. Nathanson said of OddLot’s decision to double its film count to at least three or four a year, and to dig deeper into the “Ender’s Game” business, if the movie meets its goals.

A science fiction novel published in 1985, “Ender’s Game” long seemed to have disadvantages as movie material. Its violent, complicated story is built around a boy-hero with a knack for killing. And it depends on a deeply concealed twist at the end.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/business/media/enders-game-is-a-bet-for-gigi-pritzkers-oddlot-entertainment.html?partner=rss&emc=rss