CANNES: Millennium Films and West Coast Film Partners Launch $100 Million Collaboration With ‘White House Taken’

Millennium Films decided to dress up its Saturday-night Croisette party on Baoli Beach with $100 million worth of decoration.

While ostensibly celebrating the company’s new Gerard Butler action thriller “White House Taken,” Millennium chairman Avi Lerner took the opportunity to announce a new three-year, $100-million co-financing and co-production partnership with West Coast Film Partners. The deal calls for the two companies to collaborate on two or three films per year beginning with the Antoine Fuqua-directed “White House Taken,” which features Butler as a disgraced Secret Service agent who fights back when North Koreans take over the White House.

Lerner, partner Trevor Short, Mark Gill and Lonnie Ramati negotiated the deal for Millennium with West Coast CEO Klay Shroedel and president Stefan Gray, and Gary Concoff of Troy Gould on behalf of West Coast, an equity fund and production company based in Germany, the U.K. and L.A.

“We’re very excited to be working with Klay and his team at West Coast,” said Lerner. “Clearly, they have financing expertise. But also the movies they want to make are very much in line with the direction we’re taking our company today.”

Shroedel added: “The team at Millennium impressed us with their commercial sensibilities and their willingness and ability to get movies made. At a time when so many companies in the film business are retrenching, these guys are expanding. We share their optimism about the potential for growth and success in the motion picture business, if properly managed, in the years ahead.”

Millennium will next release “The Expendables 2,” “Playing The Field” and “The Paperboy,” which is playing in competition at the Cannes Film Festival this week.