Good day everyone. Welcome to Cineverse’s Third Quarter Fiscal 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. My name is Matt, and I’ll be your operator today. Currently all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will have a question-and-answer session following management’s prepared remarks. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Gary Loffredo, Chief Legal Officer, Secretary and Senior Adviser for Cineverse.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the Cineverse fiscal year 2025 third quarter financial results conference call. The press release announcing Cineverse’s results for the third quarter ended December 31, 2024, is available at the Investors section of the company’s website at www.cineverse.com. A replay of this broadcast will also be made available at Cineverse website after the conclusion of this call. Before we begin, I would like to point out that certain statements made on this call contain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management’s current expectations and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. The company’s periodic reports that are filed with the SEC describe potential risks and uncertainties that could cause the company’s business and financial results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. All the information discussed on this call are as of today, February 13, 2025. Cineverse does not assume any obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements, except as required by law. In addition, certain financial information presented in this call represent non-GAAP financial measures. And we encourage you to read our disclosures and the reconciliation tables to applicable GAAP measures in our earnings release carefully as you consider these metrics. I’m Gary Loffredo, Chief Legal Officer, Secretary and Senior Adviser at Cineverse. With me today are Chris McGurk, Chairman and CEO; Eric Opeka, President and Chief Strategy Officer; Tony Huidor, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer; Mark Lindsey, Chief Financial Officer; Mark Torres, Chief People Officer; and Yolanda Macias, Chief Content Officer, all of whom will be available for questions following the prepared remarks. On today’s call, Chris will discuss our fiscal year 2025 third quarter highlights, the latest operational development, outlook and long-term growth strategy. Mark will follow with a review of our results for the fiscal third quarter ended December 31, 2024. And Eric will provide some detail on our streaming business results and operating initiatives before opening the floor for questions. I will now turn the call over to Chris McGurk to begin.

Thank you, Gary, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. This was the strongest quarter in the company’s history. We recorded $40.7 million in total revenues, up $27.5 million from the prior year quarter. We generated $7.2 million in net income a $9.9 million increase from the prior year quarter. We recorded $10.8 million in adjusted EBITDA, a $9 million increase from the prior year quarter. Our operating margin was 48%, within our targeted range of 45% to 50%. And as of yesterday, we had more than $13 million in cash on hand and zero debt with a full $7.5 million available on our line of credit with East West Bank. These results were driven in large part by the unprecedented success of Terrifier 3, but they also reflect strong growth across all of the company’s key lines of business. Mark and Eric will speak to our financial results and operating highlights across the full span of our business in just a few minutes. I will focus now on what we believe the future holds for our feature film releasing and marketing business, which we believe is uniquely poised to be a major source of new revenue and profits for the company on an ongoing basis. After stunning the industry in October, when Art the Clown displaced Joaquin Phoenix as the joker at the top of the box office charts, Terrifier 3 charged on to become the highest grossing non-rated film ever with more than $54 million of the domestic box office, topping previous record holder Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé. Subsequently, Terrifier 3 has done very strong business in digital sales in blu-ray and DVD, topping the sales charts there as well. The film debuts tomorrow on our screen box for our streaming channel and we are currently reviewing…

Thank you, Chris. As Chris noted, this quarter was our strongest quarter in history. Even with massive expectations this quarter, we were still able to beat analyst consensus guidance for revenue $40.7 million versus $36.4 million; net income $7.2 million versus $5.1 million; diluted EPS $0.34 per share versus $0.31; and adjusted EBITDA $10.8 million versus $8.2 million. For the quarter, Cineverse reported record revenues of $40.7 million compared to $13.3 million for the same quarter last year, or a 207% increase. In addition, compared to our second quarter ended September 30, 2024, revenues increased by $28 million or 220%. While the box office results for Terrifier 3 were the major catalyst for our record revenue this quarter, the remainder of our business also performed exceptionally well. Year-over-year, our streaming and digital revenues grew by 48%; and podcast and other revenue grew by 138%. In a few minutes Erick will discuss in further detail the non Terrifier initiatives that drove these improved results. Considering the ancillary revenues associated with Terrifier 3, the continued double digit growth of our podcast business, improved content licensing opportunities, and expected growth in our direct advertising revenues, we are expecting a material increase in revenue for our fiscal fourth quarter ended March 31, 2025 compared to the prior year quarter. As Chris mentioned, our direct operating margin for the quarter was 48%, which is in line with our previously issued guidance of 45% to 50%. Our improved operating margin is a direct result of our cost optimization initiatives implemented over the last 18 months. We expect our direct operating margin in future quarters to remain in the 45% to 50% range. SG&A expenses for the quarter were $9.4 million, an increase of $3 million for the third quarter compared to the prior year quarter, primarily…

Thank you, Mark. Today I am going to cover three key areas of our business: an overview of our next generation theatrical strategy, an overview of our digital distribution initiatives and our technology and advertising business. First, let’s talk about our theatrical strategy. Our approach to theatrical is fundamentally different from the traditional studio model. Instead of chasing nine-figure tentpoles, we’re following a moneyball strategy for theatrical releasing, focusing on proven IP and franchises that studios often overlook. These films have already established – fan bases, strong ancillary track records and proven box office performance, vastly reducing our risk and increasing profitability across multiple windows. What sets us apart is not just our film selection strategy, but the structural advantages we bring to the table. Our deal structures are fair, ensuring talent creators benefit equally alongside the studio and are aligned to ensure success. At the same time, we’re going to leverage our significant media assets, proprietary ad tech and in house capabilities to dramatically reduce costs and increase efficiencies in the releasing process. This approach drives higher margins for both Cineverse and our creator partners, making us a highly attractive home for filmmakers and IP holders who are coming in droves to the doors as Chris described earlier. Our ability to do this comes from more than a decade of investment in our technology and infrastructure, including machine learning and AI driven marketing and distribution models. This is a massive moat that competitors our size simply cannot replicate. Unlike traditional distributors who rely on expensive broad reach campaigns, we use data and automation to precision target audiences, ensuring our marketing spend delivers outsized returns. Under this model, we’re rapidly building a slate towards eight to ten wide and specialty theatrical releases per year, putting us on par with the…

[Operator Instructions] First question is from the line of Dan Kurnos with Benchmark. Your line is now open. Dan, please check if you can unmute.

Hey, sorry, can you guys hear me now?

Yes, we do.

Okay. Good. All right. Sorry about that. I spent about a minute talking to myself, wonderful, congratulations on the quarter. Fantastic. Obviously, Chris, appreciate the color on Toxic Avenger. Let me just ask you a couple of things in general here. One, and Eric, also the incremental color on the building slate. So first, how do we think about number of screens on release here? Obviously, you guys have Canal. So there’s potentially global ramifications to this, which you didn’t have with T3. So first question, just size of screens, number of screens, and is that going to vary by film? Or are you guys going to look to kind of build a sort of consistent distribution platform by film size and screen release as you guys build out the film library?

Yes. Thanks, Dan. This is Chris. We’re looking to follow our release pattern on the film was very similar to what we did with Terrifier 3 trying to get it out on 1,500 to 2,500 screens, which we think is the right amount for these very targeted films. We see the big studios and their wide releases sometimes with 3,500, 4,000 screens, but they do 90% of their business on 1,500 to 2,500 screens. So we’re going to take a much more targeted approach on these films and targeted an average of about 2,000 screens going forward. The good news is that we’ve got this huge pool of content that we’re looking at right now and we’ve been very selective with the choices that we’ve made. You saw the first three Toxic Avenger, Silent Night Deadly Night and now Wolf Creek: Legacy. And we’re really looking, as I said, for properties that we can clearly follow the same playbook that we executed on Terrifier. Known IP, successful IP where we know there’s a fan base in a very targeted fan base that we know we can get to. And I think you saw, based on what I said in my remarks, the economics of these movies, we’re able to pick and choose as well, and we’ve cut some very, very favorable deals. Toxic Avenger, for instance, as a budget that’s many times greater than the budget on Terrifier 3. But our investment level will probably end up being less than what we invested in Terrifier 3 for acquisition and for marketing costs and a really good movie. And our upside is a lot greater because basically, we bought the distribution rights in perpetuity and we don’t have a big participant where we’re sharing the upside of economic with. So we think we can do more deals like that going forward and expect more announcements in that regard soon.

Should we think, Chris, that or the opportunity to kind of just out in another genre would take you got at something in another genre or would you save that more for the advertising channel?

I didn’t hear the first part of your question. Sorry.

Sorry, I asked if you guys would expand into another genre, if you think that – is this all going to be horror? Or would you expand it to another genre or keep that mostly on the advertising side if you were going to move out of the horror genre?

Well, obviously, we’ve kind of made our films in the horror genre, so we’re getting a lot of properties coming our way. But we’re looking at properties in the family space as well, comedy, urban properties where we think we’ve got strength from our channel footprint and our podcast footprint to hypermarket just as we did in Terrifier 3 and where there’s a known fan base and known IP. So I’m very hopeful that in the next few months, as we make announcements, you’ll see that we’re rounding out our portfolio in other genres. But with the same kind of really favorable economics that I’ve been talking about, and in areas where we can very closely follow the blueprint for success in terms of marketing that we have with Terrifier.

Thank you for your question. Next question is from the line of Brian Kinstlinger with Alliance Global Partners. Your line is now open.

Great. Thanks. I got a few questions with a great quarter and congratulations on your success. You talked about taking on some debt, I assume this is due to the pipeline of opportunities in front of you, given the success of Terrifier that we talked about. Can you talk about the ranges of prices for relevant core content, especially for the lease films you’re going to remake? Can you share maybe the average price you paid so far? And is there a return on invested capital that you’re looking at that you target?

Yes. Thanks, Brian. This is Chris again. I think I mentioned on this call in the past that our total investment on Terrifier 3 for both acquisition and marketing was less than $5 million or around $5 million. All three other properties that we’re talking about now are below that and our expectations are going to be below that. And I think that’s the range that we’re talking about. And I think that creates a really unbelievable positive risk reward profile for us. The – your other question was and I think the pool is big enough to know that we’re going to be able to fill up a release slate of 8 to 10 movies on a steady-state basis and stick to those economics. We have no desire to step up into the bigger budget film. We don’t need to, okay?

Yes.

We just have one of the highest return movies in the history of the film business, and we spent less than $5 million, and we spent less than $1 million in marketing all in and got $54 million at the box office. If we can do half of that or a fraction of that these other properties are going to do really, really well because of the favorable economics that we’re looking at here. So I don’t know if that answers your question, but we’re feeling very good about our space and the kind of be able to generate with that sort of economics.

Great.

Right. I’ll add…

Yes.

I was going to say I’ll add. The other side to this, too, is as you saw with our partnership with Studio Canal, we’ll even bring in partners earlier Studio Canal effectively, for example, on Silent Night Deadly Night eliminates half of our risk in the project by that partnership, right? So we’re taking this, like I said earlier on the call, a moneyball approach where we’re focused on ROI. And while we hope that some of these breakout, and we will have the ability to push them and write them if they happen to breakout to Terrifier type levels. It happens. So our competitors have these breakouts happen. But I think our goal is to have these, as Chris described, these that we’re going for singles and doubles. We’re not swinging for the fences on every movie hoping to have a Terrifier.

And then again, I said this on the last call, maybe I didn’t see. Because we’re releasing movies it was such an efficient low level of marketing spend and getting the kind of results that we got on Terrifier 2 and Terrifier 3. It creates a much better economic situation for our producer partners, filmmakers who want to come to us because they don’t have the usual $5 million to $20 million of marketing in between them and their participation. And so that’s been recognized in the business and it’s led to all these opportunities for us coming our way. And obviously, we like that. We also like the idea that we sort of helped develop a model that we need to prove the concept going forward, but hopefully, it’s going to enable independent filmmakers to get their films released theatrically and get access to more eyeballs. The marketing spend piece has always been the big bugaboo and the independent film releasing business and hopefully, we crack the code here.

Thank you. The – I just wanted to touch on two other pieces of your business. I wasn’t quite sure on cineSearch how that’s progressing in terms of monetization? And then on Max point, you announced two deals. And I guess, can you help frame for what the revenue opportunity for customers like these are? Can you give a range of opportunity?

Sure, sure. Well, I can tell you so first of all, tackle cineSearch. When we have revealed that product to the market, when we talk about cineSearch, the consumer facing piece that’s in demo, anybody can test it out, kick the tires, that’s we’re not selling that commercial version of the product. What we are selling is the back end and capabilities that allow OEMs and others to effectively – vastly improve their search results and capabilities. So that piece we’re in active conversations with a lot of parties today. We’re in development of the second version of the technology that powers that. We expect it to be completed within the next quarter or so. So we think commercial opportunities for that as we get out of the early developmental stages, the R&D stages of this to full commercialization will start to happen in the next fiscal year. In terms of Matchpoint, when we talk about average customer size, we are – we’re targeting a couple different segments. The SMB segment is a clear segment for us, as well as, we are also targeting enterprise. So the average customer value is going to vary depending on the size of customer we target. We’ve been talking internally about SMB customers being on the lower six figures annual sort of target range. And enterprise customers can be many, many multiples above that depending on the implementation. The enterprise deals tend to have a more custom or specialized implementation. So I would expect those to be significantly higher than the SMB side.

That’s super helpful.

They could – they could raise – they could raise millions of dollars. Yes.

I look back and you have been discussing increased investments to drive subscriber growth. And I know podcasting as well, those are two important pieces to your business. Now I see the trends and number of people and I’m not sure even downloads, but where are we in terms of revenue contribution from those as we evaluate the better inventory fill rates. I haven’t seen that in the last couple of quarters?

And are you talking about the podcast business? Or are you talking about the other side...

I mean the subscription business, I’m curious what the revenue contribution is in the podcasting business, I’m not sure if I heard where downloads or viewership are. And maybe then you can discuss how inventory fill rates are improving to drive stronger monetization of your podcasting?

Yes, sure. So on the podcasting business, the viewership numbers bounce around month-to-month, but the high watermark in the last quarter was about 15 million downloads. So pretty significant audience size and up from where it was trending the prior quarter. I think we were averaging 12.5 [ph] or so. On the fill rate program, there’s two pieces to that. There’s the programmatic side. I think we’re still in the 50-ish percent to 55% fill rate on that – on programmatic. But we’ve been bundling our campaign, our inventory into 360 campaigns. So our fill rates have actually gone up substantially as podcasts have been a bigger part of the sales mix for our sales team. So for example, when we do a movie deal for a studio movie, we’re bundling. Typically, the engagement is on the bigger engagements, we’re producing some kind of live event or premier plus bundling, web, social, CTV and podcast into one campaign. So the podcast business has been lifted by that inclusion as part of a bundle as part of the whole media mix. Our advertisers love it. It’s highly differentiated from pure-play CTV, which is in, I’m sure you know, is in wide abundance and high availability right now and not very differentiated. So this is a very differentiated approach. That’s driving up CPMs just simply because we’re bundling it into high teens level plus CPM to low 20 CPM when we do those deals. We expect, as we bring on direct podcast sellers, which we’ve expanded that team pretty dramatically so far that the podcast business will – less and less of it will be programmatic over time. My target for the next 18 to 24 months is to push that to well below 50%, and I think we’re already showing a path to that.

Great. And then just quickly on subscriptions. Can you give us a sense for revenue contribution? I think last year, you were, I’d have to look at my model here about 3.5-ish per quarter in revenue. Are we much higher than that today? Are we at a similar path that you’ve highlighted the intent to increase your investments and drive that growth?

Yes, I think – so I think that’s where we have been. That’s the rearview mirror kind of look. I think our target for the year would be to get that to double-digit plus growth I think we were clocking in at kind of 6%, 7% for the prior year. I think the goal is to get that up to 15% plus. So you can kind of back into that number. But that’s the focus for this year is really to make that a growth catalyst. We have spent – we’ve put most of our capital towards scaling the theatrical – the emerging theatrical business and some other initiatives, but we really see the subscription business as a very good investment and deployment of capital for this year, given some of the market dynamics we’re seeing.

Great. Thank you guys.

Thank you, Brian.

Thank you for your question. There are no further questions remaining. So I’ll pass the conference back to the management team for any closing remarks.

Thank you. This is Chris. So thank you all for joining us today. And as always, please feel very free to reach out to Julie Milstead with any additional questions you might have, and we look forward to speaking to you all again on our next quarterly call in June. Thank you.

That concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.