HarbourView Equity Partners has made an investment in Mucho Mas Media, the Los Angeles-based content company behind the new golf-themed movie “The Long Game.”
The deal calls for HarbourView Equity to executive produce films with Mucho Mas co-CEOs Javier Chapa and Vincent Cordero. With HarbourView’s investment, Mucho Mas intends to expand the scope of its activity in film and TV. HarbourView CEO Sherrese Clarke Soares is on board as an executive producer of “The Long Game,” an adaptation of the Humberto Garcia novel “Mustang Miracle.” The film tells the true story of a group of Mexican American caddies who created their own golf course in the South Texas brush in 1955 and two years later won the Texas State High School Golf Championship.
Mucho Mas describes itself as “an inclusive LatinX multimedia platform cultivating talent and producing content for global audiences.” One reason the deal appealed to HarbourView is that the company’s work yields insights into pop culture trends and particularly youth culture. Clarke Soares sees Mucho Mas as an example of a new-breed production and management firm that can deliver movies, TV shows and other content to targeted audiences on a modest budget, by the standards of today’s inflated production cost structure as the Peak TV boom unwinds.
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HarbourView’s Mucho Mas investment comes after the Newark-based asset management company acquired a stake last year in Charles D. King’s production-management firm Macro. Chapa and Cordero emphasized that the HarbourView pact is significant for the industry at large.
“We want to emphasize the importance of Sherrese and her team at HarbourView” said Chapa, who is co-CEO and chief content officer, and Cordero, who is co-CEO and chief business officer. “We’re grateful to all our investors for their commitment to invest and empower Latino founders and startups, for the expansion and betterment of the global media industry.”
Based in Newark, N.J., HarbourView is becoming increasingly active in film and TV at a time of massive disruption for industry business models and tumult among the media giants the dominate the content marketplace. To Clarke Soares, who spent 15 years as a managing director at Morgan Stanley before launching HarbourView in 2021, this is a moment of opportunity.
“We’re building an investment firm that is important to the creative eco-system,” Clarke Soarkes told Variety. “We’re investing across entertainment, broadly: film, TV and music. We see this really interesting opportunity to build a firm of scale that can be a capital partner to these segments of the industry.”
Clarke Soares believes that independent outfits focused on content creation are poised to thrive at a time when Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global, NBCUniversal and others are struggling to transition from linear and on-demand business models. HarbourView is not a holding company per se, but it offers more that just a bankroll to its portfolio firms.
“We’re not an operator. So we’re not a strategic partner in that way, but we’re not a purely financial supermarket, like the big [investment firms] are,” she said. “We come with a level of specialty and expertise. We also really understand the creator and the creative process.”
HarbourView is betting on the primacy of content above all else, even as the Streaming Wars and Peak TV dynamics wind down. Strong movies and TV shows from next-generation talent such as those that flow through Macro and Mucho Mas are worth the risk, Clarke Soares said.
“Our underlying thesis is that in 25 years from now, everybody will still be listening to music. And everybody will still be watching their favorite shows,” she said. “How they watch them, how they experience them, those things will change over time. Storytelling and music, it’s core to the human experience. And so being as close to investing in the creation of new IP and supporting people and businesses that are powered by exceptional IP — that’s where we want to invest.”
Clarke Soares points to an early success story from her strategy of investing in regional Mexican music song catalogs as well as indie music labels in a range of genres. HarbourView got big in the regional Mexican music space years before Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma had big hit last summer with the “Ella Baila Sola.”
“When many people were like, ‘Why did you need that investment? You’re just investing in things that no one knows about.’ And I’m like ‘No, I’m investing in things that you don’t know about,’ ” Clarke Soares said.
The content that is the focus of development for Mucho Mas and for Macro is aimed at underserved audiences. “The way content is consumed right now, it’s so decentralized,” Clarke Soares said. “It’s not about the audience being spoon-fed anymore, it’s about about them pulling out what’s really interesting to them.”
The Mucho Mas partnership was a natural outgrowth of HarbourView’s music investments. “We know how to connect the dots in our eco-system. We know that this audience is under-penetrated with respect to stories and music. And when they do get them, they want to see it and engage with it,” Clarke Soares said.
Clarke Soares first began investing in film slates nearly 20 years ago, during her time at Morgan Stanley. She’s not at all surprised to see the innovation, creativity and economic efficiencies coming out of independent shops like Mucho Mas.
At present, Hollywood’s “machine in the middle is going through a massive transformation, and one of the big things around that transformation is cost,” Clarke Soares said. “So how do we identify getting really amazing IP to a decentralized audience? How do we get that content to those audiences in a cost-effective manner? Javier and Vincent and the team at Mucho Mas really know how to do that. And so for us as investors we see A — the audience is there. B — we think there are ways for us to connect that in our ecosystem. And if you can figure out how to make these things at a price that makes sense, then the movie doesn’t have to do $100 million at the box office.”
“The Long Game” opened April 12 in theaters through an indie distribution partnership with Bonniedale Entertainment and Fifth Season. The film will also have a robust digital home entertainment distribution strategy. HarbourView took advantage of “The Long Game” release to enlist artists Zulia and Los Esquivels to release a single and music video inspired by the film, “No Está Funcionando.”
“The Long Game” was directed and co-written by Julio Quintana. The movie stars Jay Hernandez, Cheech Marin, Julian Works, Paulina Chávez, Dennis Quaid and Brett Cullen. The film screened last week at the White House prior to its debut.
(Pictured: HarbourView Equity Partners CEO Sherrese Clarke Soares)
