Did you know Fandango offered a free streaming video service?
While interviewing Will McIntosh, president of digital platforms and ventures for Versant, which owns Fandango, at TheGrill 2026, TheWrap Managing Editor Roger Cheng posed that question to the audience.
Crickets.
While most people know Fandango for selling movie tickets, it had quietly become the No. 2 transactional VOD platform in the U.S. behind only Amazon (it used to be known as Vudu). Currently, Versant is working to also establish Fandango as a free streaming brand.
To that end, McIntosh announced at TheGrill a partnership between Versant and Lionsgate that will make all five previously released “Hunger Games” movies available to stream for free on Fandango’s platform with minimal commercial interruptions for two weeks before tickets go on sale for “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping,” which hits theaters in the U.S. in November.
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“That’s a very prescriptive way where we’re gonna take the one thing we’re known for — ticket sales — and tie it back to something new that we’re trying to build with this free streaming service,” the Versant executive explained, adding, “I think it speaks to [the fact that] we can’t do it on our own and we need partners like Lionsgate to really lean in. Fortunately, they do.”
That type of novel program is an example of the new risk-taking spirit taking hold at Versant, which spun out of cable giant Comcast only 10 months ago. McIntosh said that Versant defines the company by its four verticals: business news and finance (CNBC), political opinion news (MS NOW), sports and golf lifestyle (Golf Channel, GolfNow) and genre sports and entertainment (E!, Syfy, Oxygen, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes and USA Network). The broader goal is move away from its reliance on the ever-shrinking cable TV revenue.
That ambition — and it’s smaller size — has played an instrumental role in shaping Versant’s “entrepreneurial” approach to expansion, acquisition and growth. Over its short stretch as a public company, it has made four acquisitions, including the cloud-based business management software platform formerly known as the Indy Cinema Group and Full Swing, the No. 1 golf simulator tech company.
Both acquisitions had been on leaders’ minds prior to Versant’s spin-off, but they never had the freedom to truly pursue either at Comcast.
“My experiences inside of Comcast were largely fantastic. My group was able to operate as a well-funded start-up inside of a company that had a lot of capital for a long time,” McIntosh said. “But the last five years there, it was very difficult to get some of our best ideas greenlit and to continue to grow our businesses the way we had historically, and for all the right reasons.”
“Comcast, a big company, was building multiple billion-dollar theme parks. We were spending billions of dollars trying to get Peacock to scale, and Comcast has to constantly invest in its broadband infrastructure. What that meant for businesses like GolfNow and Fandango is that there wasn’t a lot of capital left to reinvest,” McIntosh added. Since Versant’s move into its own, publicly traded company, the red tape and bureaucracy has been significantly cut down.
“The biggest difference is we’re able to be entrepreneurial, nimble. There’s a very straight line to [Versant CEO] Mark [Lazarus] to get a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’” McIntosh explained. “A lot of the early organic growth initiatives and some of the M&A we’ve done were all ideas that we had inside of Comcast that we just could not act on. I think it’s put us in a place to be entrepreneurial.”
With all of its acquisitions, Versant wants to expand its ability to “connect people with what they’re passionate about” by tying established media platforms and brands to new, transactional technologies. “If you look at our golf vertical today, roughly 50% of our revenue comes from the media assets and 50% of our revenue comes from the digital and transactional assets,” McIntosh said Wednesday. “The goal over the next three to five years is to do that in the other three verticals. We’re just getting started, but we’re well on our way.”
Like every company in its position, Versant faces a constant “build vs. buy” question with every acquisition it plans and considers. For years, the answer to that question has always depended on how much organic growth investors believe can be generated by an asset after it is acquired. However, McIntosh admitted that AI has further complicated that already complex equation.
“Because [on] what’s going on with AI, I think the idea of building and building quickly is much different now than it was even two or three years ago,” he said. “I do think that ‘build vs. buy’ question is a good one, and I do think we’ll actually probably build more in the future.”
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