Aarcflick

 Former Disney executives Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs have made 10 acquisitions, starting with Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine and a minority investment in Westbrook from Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, since they launched their Blackstone-backed media company Candle Media in 2021. But CEOs Mayer and Staggs told Variety's co-editor in chief Cynthia Littleton at Variety's Entertainment Summit at CES on Friday that the success of their strategy is to balance assets tied to the biggest names with content that it hits "above its weight", as it did for Moonbug Entertainment, which produces the hit children's series “CoComelon”. A consistent presence on Netflix's weekly Top 10 English-language TV series list, Staggs described the value of "CoComelon" to Candle Media this way: "On a relative scale, it's not the most expensive show we've got, but it's important, and that's what we like, we like programming that really matters to distr...