Garson Foos, CEO, Radial Entertainment (Photo by Cam Thrower)
October 27, 2025
Garson Foos welcomes a visitor to his West L.A. office with a firm handshake and a hearty smile. As the CEO of Radial Entertainment, a new supergroup in the world of independent film and television distribution, he’s clearly energized by the opportunities, and undaunted by the challenges, in bringing together two key players, Shout! Studios and FilmRise, into a private equity-owned giant with a vast library of more than 70,000 films and shows and an even more formidable multi-platform
distribution network.
He has a hip vibe, favors a casual style of dress — jeans, loafers, and shirt sleeves half rolled up — and bears somewhat of a likeness to Kevin Costner. But his voice radiates with the determination and confidence of a class ‘A’ Wall Street dealmaker as he lays out his vision for a company he predicts will be much bigger than the sum of its parts.
“What we came to realize pretty early on when we were in discussions to do this was that there’s a lot of diversity in the businesses,” says Foos, who previously ran Shout! Studios. “FilmRise was primarily in the FAST and AVOD business, and it’s a leader in those areas, with an enormous library that’s really well suited for those distribution channels.
“Shout! also has a strong FAST and AVOD business, but that’s only about a third of the total business. We also have a significant transactional business, including digital rentals and downloads, and a robust fixed-fee licensing business, in which we license our movies and shows to broadcasters, cable and subscription platforms worldwide. Additionally, we still have a good physical business, so we have four of those revenue streams.
“Now we can take FilmRise content where they may not have been focused on monetizing it in other categories, and we can monetize it very effectively in those areas. By combining our expertise and distribution networks, we can leverage our collective content to reach new heights in the global market.”
Within weeks of completing the deal in early July, Foos notes, Radial Entertainment enhanced FilmRise’s popular sci-fi channel with “Farscape,” a cult science-fiction TV series that ran for four seasons beginning in 1999.
“So it would be situations like that — genre channels that both companies have where you can take content from the other company, put it up on the channel and have an even better content offering,” Foos says.
Aside from programming, much of Foos’ attention is now focused on integrating the two companies to find synergies as well as cost savings.
“We started integration planning four months before the close of the deal, but there’s certain things you can’t do until the companies are fully together,” he says. “You can only let so many people under the tent that you needed to get involved, from an integration decision standpoint.”
Even so, less than a month after the deal closed, Radial Entertainment announced its new management team. David Buoymaster was named chief investment officer. Johnny Holden was appointed chief revenue and strategy officer. And Max Pinigin took on the role of CFO.
Buoymaster, previously SVP of corporate strategy and finance at FilmRise, is responsible for leading the content strategy, underwriting process, and investment decision-making for the company. He also chairs a newly formed investment committee, guiding long-term strategic decisions and company direction. Additionally, Buoymaster is responsible for company-wide business intelligence and data products, with the mission of surfacing actionable insights to all departments and enhancing the efficiency and efficacy of the company.
Holden, who had been chief strategy officer and CFO at FilmRise, now leads all revenue-generating functions and is charged with setting the combined company’s strategic direction across both existing and newly acquired content. He over-sees revenue generation across the streaming landscape, while also managing marketing efforts that support sales and audience growth. Holden works closely with the investment committee to shape long-term strategy, expand global platform partnerships, and drive sustained value across Radial’s distribution ecosystem.
And Pinigin, previously CFO at Shout! Studios, heads Radial Entertainment’s financial planning and reporting, corporate development, investor relations, accounting, treasury and compliance.
Radial also announced the appointments of Melissa Boag as chief marketing officer; Minh Vo as general counsel and EVP of business affairs; Brian Blum as EVP of operations; Thibault Hermenault as EVP of technical services; Julie Dansker as co-head of sales, distribution and strategy, and EVP of global licensing and international distribution; Daniel Gagliardi as co-head of sales, distribution and strategy, and EVP of North American digital distribution; and CJ Laychak as EVP of strategic operations. All previously held executive positions at either Shout! or FilmRise.
While the new executive team is in place, Foos says, “there are still lots of decisions to be made as we go along. The plan is to have everything fully integrated by the end of the year. Certain departments can be integrated faster than others, such as acquisitions and sales. So there’s a tremendous amount of work underway to unify systems and processes and to be able to become one.”
On the content side, Foos says, “we’re looking for some opportunities on the physical side for FilmRise, which has a good film library with some noteworthy indie films, such as Party Girl, Meet the Patels and Bernie. And on the transaction side of the business, we’ve got a dozen FilmRise titles launching in October. There’s a lower barrier to entry on transactional than there is on physical, where you have to deal with 4K transfers, manufacturing, shipping, and all sorts of other logistics.”
The seeds for the Shout! Studios/FilmRise merger were sown in January 2023, when Shout! was sold to Oaktree Capital Partners, a publicly traded global investment management firm that specializes in alternative investments.
Foos says he and his two partners in Shout!, older brother Richard (of Rhino Records fame) and Bob Emmer, “had decided awhile before that, that we wanted to realize more of the value of the company than we were able to under our full ownership. So we went out looking to see if we could sell a portion of the company. And what we found when we went out to the market was that the interest was in buying a majority stake. So we had a number of offers and Oaktree just turned out to be the best partner for us. And they’ve been fantastic. They really work closely with us, and they’re good people — easy to work with.”
After the Oaktree acquisition closed, Foos says, “we spent the first year looking for things to buy and we made a deal for the top 200 titles in the Sonar library. In 2024 things really got rolling when we bought Open Road, a fantastic library of 50 major theatrical films, and then the Millennium library, Gravitas Ventures and Golden Princess, with 156 action movies from the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema, including such early John Woo movies as Hard Boiled and The Killer. We’ve done theatrical runs on some of the key movies and put some of them out on TVOD, with a disc rollout starting this fall.”
Early on, Foos says, “we had talked about FilmRise and how if they ever decided that they wanted to sell the company, that they would be about the best target that we could find, the best partner that we could have. And we knocked on [FilmRise founder and CEO] Danny Fisher’s door many times and he wasn’t interested, he wasn’t ready, and then eventually he finally got to know us and we got to a place where he and his partners decided they wanted to see if there was a deal to be made.”
Oaktree management was fully on board, Foos says. “They really felt like this is the big one, the Holy Grail,” he says. “And so we were able to work out terms and a good structure for the executive team and Danny’s role. We decided, with Danny, that it made sense for him to become the head of the board of directors, as executive chairman. So that’s his role. And they fortunately decided that they wanted me to be the CEO of the combined companies.”
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And who, exactly, is Garson Foos? The youngest of three brothers, Foos was born and raised in the Los Angeles area and as a teenager worked at the iconic Rhino Records store in Westwood that his older brother, Richard, had co-founded in 1973. Five years later, Rhino Records ventured into distribution and helped spark the music industry’s big reissue boom, re-releasing classic vinyl LPs by the likes of the Monkees and the Turtles. The record label prospered and soon signed new artists as well, including roots rockers Rank and File and the Beat Farmers as well as Byrds co-founder Gene Clark and indie rock band NRBQ.
Time Warner bought a 50% stake in Rhino Records in 1992, and eight years later acquired the rest of the company. In the meantime, Rhino had also ventured into home video.
The two Foos brothers, along with partner Bob Emmer, left Rhino shortly after the sale and in 2002 opened up shop as Shout! Factory, a home video label focused on curating and reviving beloved, often overlooked, pop-culture classics on DVD.
“At the time, the music business was in steep decline,” Foos recalls. “It was when file sharing was happening, and people were converting to digital; CD sales were plummeting, and vinyl was non-existent.
“We started out doing some music, but it just really wasn’t going great. So we started getting rights to TV series — not the big current hit shows, but older shows with loyal followings. Remember, this was in the early days of DVD, and there was a real boom for TV on DVD because for the first time ever you could package complete seasons or even series in a relatively compact space.
“Our first really big success was when we got the rights to ‘Freaks and Geeks’ from DreamWorks TV. We spent a lot of money licensing the music so we could get the show released, and it did fantastic. Then we got the rights to ‘SCTV,’ the Canadian sketch comedy show, and, again, we were able to license the music, a very complicated process that we understood because of our Rhino background. ‘SCTV’ did great as well. And then we saw that this could be a very good business for us.”
Shout! continued to acquire and license vintage TV shows, from mainstream series such as “Route 66,” “Barney Miller” and “WKRP in Cincinnati,” where the company took pride in restoring the original music tracks, to boxed sets of popular animated series from the 1980s and ’90s, such as “The Transformers,” “G.I. Joe,” “My Little Pony,” and various Nickelodeon shows that fans had been clamoring for.
“The company really took off pretty fast because of those TV shows, particularly the animated series, which came about in 2009 when we got the rights to all of Hasbro’s nontheatrical content, primarily for DVD,” Foos says. “And then when streaming came on and became a business, we saw we needed to move in that direction as well, so we started getting more broad rights and started making deals with Netflix and the other subscription platforms and cable channels. And then we just kind of kept broadening and broadening from there — we started buying libraries and we got involved with ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000,’ which we ended up co-owning the IP on so we could make new episodes.”
All the while, Foos and his team were developing label brands (Shout! Select, Scream Factory, Shout! Kids) and licensing deep libraries to broadcasters around the world. Shout also made a strategic decision to dominate the North American anime market through licensing deals with GKIDS and Toei Animation, and struck additional distribution pacts with Laika, ALF and The Jim Henson Co. to keep its pipeline fresh.
As the streaming phenomenon took off, Shout! evolved into a true multi-platform distributor: theatrical and event cinema, transactional and subscription VOD, FAST/AVOD through Shout! TV and other channels, broadcast, and premium collector’s edition DVD, Blu-ray Disc and 4K Ultra HD. The company also became a leader in 4K restorations and compelling bonus content that galvanized fan communities.
Foos was at the center of Shout!’s shape-shifting strategy. He emphasized disciplined rights acquisitions, revenue diversification (retail, digital, licensing), and operational rigor around workflows and cost controls, moving Shout! from a collector-driven label into a multi-platform studio that could develop, acquire, license and distribute across the full stack of filmed entertainment options. His approach balanced fan-focused physical editions with flexible digital exploitation, helping Shout! ride the decline of DVD into the rise of OTT without losing brand equity.
FilmRise was launched in 2012 by brothers Danny and Jack Fisher with partner Alan Klingenstein using a data-driven thesis: identify under-monetized film/TV libraries, acquire rights at scale, and then meet demand on emerging digital distribution platforms. Early profitability came from reviving dormant titles on DVD and in digital marketplaces; the company soon pivoted harder into ad-supported streaming, building one of the largest independently owned portfolios of AVOD apps and FAST channels and syndicating branded linear channels across The Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus, Freevee, Vizio and others. Signature library drivers — such as “Unsolved Mysteries” and “Forensic Files” — proved the viability of the company’s model: evergreen, high-engagement series to anchor always-on channels and long-tail revenue. The firm also pursued buzzy digital IP (BuzzFeed Studios and Complex Networks libraries) and reality/crime troves that over-index in AVOD. By the time of the merger with Shout! in July, FilmRise was projecting hundreds of FAST channels live, emblematic of its “distribution-first, platform-agnostic” DNA.
Danny Fisher was the architect and public face of this strategy. A producer-financier by background, Fisher championed AVOD/FAST well before the broader market consensus, pairing proprietary demand signals with aggressive, opportunistic licensing. Fisher’s playbook emphasized scalable channel ops, metadata optimization, and relentless catalog mining — capabilities that made FilmRise an ideal complement to Shout!’s premium library curation.
Radial Entertainment plans on continuing some of Fisher’s more recent initiatives, including moving into the creator content space. Under Fisher’s direction, FilmRise developed its Creator Partner Program to distribute creator content, developed dedicated creator-centric apps and FAST channels for series such as “Unspeakable” and “That Chapter,” and, just this past August, expanded into short-form video on Amazon Fire TV Channels with clips from such popular creators as Preston and Brianna.
“It’s really a good business, and it’s expanding,” Foos says. “We’re closing deals with more creators all the time. We had actually started to move in that direction on the Shout! side, but they’re way further along and they’ve got really strong relationships with the management companies and the creator business.”
True crime is another area ripe for expansion, Foos says, building on FilmRise’s strength with popular series such as “Forensic Files,” “World’s Most Evil Killers,” “World’s Most Evil Prisoners,” “Killers: Caught on Camera” and “Unsolved Mysteries.”
Like any new company sprung from a merger of more or less equals, Radial Entertainment’s mandate is to grow, and Foos says the company’s growth playbook is focused on two areas: international markets and acquisitions.
“Both companies have good international businesses, but the scale of the two companies together, I think, will really drive growth,” Foos says.
Details will have to wait, as Radial is still finalizing the hire of an executive to spearhead global expansion, but Foos says the company will likely seek out partnerships with local media companies much as Netflix, Disney+ and the other big streamers are doing. Radial will also pick and choose content, and distribution platforms, carefully on a territory-by-territory basis.
“For example, true crime shows may do really well on performance-based businesses in Germany, while the Golden Princess library of Hong Kong action movies might be better placed with a broadcaster,” he says. “We’re making a lot of licensing deals internationally for Chinese-language movies that will get subtitled in the territories they’re going in, and it’s the same with the Millennium library — those action movies play really well outside the United States.”
On the acquisition front, Foos says, “we’re going to continue buying libraries like the ones we’ve been buying, and we’re also going to continue to look at operating companies. With Gravitas, which was an operating company, we bought it largely for the library, but we’ve maintained a staff of 10 people in Cleveland to continue running that library. We’ve also been following through on the new releases that they had already locked in prior to the close of the deal.”
In a bold prediction, Foos anticipates that within three years Radial Entertainment will double in size, a growth projection he says hinges on his leadership team’s ability to stay true to its proven formula for success.
“We’re committed to being the best distributor and FAST channel operator in the business,” he says. “Our success in acquiring rights is a mix of art and science. We have excellent analytics that allow us to accurately predict sales potential, and we have tremendous content knowledge that helps us identify high-potential movies and shows, and have a deep sense of their value.”
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