The big surprise this morning was the acquisition of M-1 Mixfight by the “undisclosed American entertainment company” that is now being disclosed as Sibling Entertainment Group. Mitch Maxwell, President, also named veteran MMA agent Monte Cox as the CEO. This is a surprise to the MMA community after the rumors from around the community aimed toward Mark Cuban, Ed Fishman, AEG Worldwide, and various other companies that are established in the mixed martial arts game. Purely for informational knowledge of the newest promotion in the business, let’s take a look at Sibling Entertainment.

Information regarding Sibling Entertainment Group

According to the article at Forbes, Sibling will be forming a new LLC under which the MMA organization will run. The LLC will be called Sibling Sports and M-1 Mixfight will now be known as M-1 Global. This is Sibling’s entry into the sports entertainment industry as they are working to expand their base from the U.S. to Asia and Europe. They have also created an alliance with SFX Media & Events to produce the events. SFX also works in sports marketing, event management and athlete management. Vadim Finkelstein, Apy Echteld, and Joost Raimond will all be part of the management team as well as Brian Patton, an accountant who was the business manager for Matt Hughes.

Sibling Entertainment is an interesting company to look at for a number of reasons. The company is run by Mitchell and Victoria Maxwell, a brother-sister combo of entertainment industry experts. Sibling is mainly known for producing On-and-Off Broadway shows, national tours, films, and other numerous ventures involving the theatrical area of entertainment.

Bob Clark runs their Theatrical corporation under the Sibling Holdings banner. Headquartered in New York City, obviously the one of the hot spots for theatre, they recently entered into an agreement to acquire Dick Foster Productions. Foster Productions is a quality provider of shows, theatrical events, and live events in the Las Vegas area and at Harrah’s Casino and Hotels. According to their site, a comedy musical called “HATS!” was produced by this company and ran a Harrah’s. This was all based on the Red Hat Society, the organization of women, usually over fifty, that get together and have fun. According to SECInfo, Maxwell has accrued many nominations for Sibling produced productions including nominations for 10 Tony Awards, 6 Olivier Awards, 15 Outer Critics Circle Awards, 9 Drama Desk Awards and 3 Obie Awards, and have won Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Obie Awards, as well as the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Victoria runs the Sibling Pictures corporation under the Sibling umbrella. It looks as if they produce smaller independent films. They have used an elite roster of talent including Matthew Arkin, Christine Baranski, Ellen Barkin, Betty Comden, Dana Delany, Olympia Dukakis, Ron Eldard, Lisa Emery, Corey Feldman, James Gandolfini, Victor Garber, Adolph Green, Robert Klein, Nathan Lane, Anthony LaPaglia, Jerry Lewis, Donald Margulies, Penny Marshall, Rob Marshall, Jerry Mitchell, Rob Morrow, Kevin Nealon, Bebe Neuwirth, Jack O’Brien, Sarah Jessica Parker, Faith Prince, Paul Rudnick, Budd Schulberg, Patrick Stewart, Daniel Sullivan, Steven Weber and Sigourney Weaver.

Sibling also manages the Denver Civic Theater under Sibling Properties, Inc. run by Jay Cardwell. The theater makes over $3 million annually in sales according to their website.

Interestingly enough, Sibling entered an agreement with Garlin Holdings Limited to form Richfield Entertainment, LLC. Apparently this is the organization that has been expanding Sibling’s operations into Russia and Europe.

Underneath, it looks like Sibling lacks a huge amount of cash to fund something like an MMA organization. Their financials (Ticker Symbol: SIBE) seem to only peak from 1-3 million per year, but they may have some substantial backing that we will know more about later.

A bit of analysis...

This is a very interesting development in the MMA community and brings about a lot of skepticism for me. First, Sibling Entertainment Group does not seem to be a money giant. They are mainly making theatrical shows along with some music ventures and production services. They also manage a theatre in Denver. The amount of cash it takes to attract fighters is significant, so I imagine there is some kind of backing involved here. According to Yahoo! Finances, Sibling has two majority holders, themselves and a man named Michael Baybak. This is one of the more interesting developments.

If anyone has kept up with news in the industry or news in general, assuming that this is the same man, Michael Baybak is most notably known for suing TIME Magazine for defamation resulting in some reporting on his activities with the Vancouver Stock Exchange. The magazine made it sound as if he was using the Church of Scientology as a front. With that said, Baybak is actually a fairly prominent figure in the Scientology community. He's also fairly avid about his investments as well. I will only touch on that aspect of Baybak. I do not know of any of his activities or if he will have any bearing on M-1 Global, but it's an interesting bit of information.

Smaller problems may include conflicts of interest in fighters who are with Monte Cox and Cox now being a CEO of a MMA organization. I think Cox was a great choice as far as his stance in the MMA community and connections throughout the industry to fighters and promoters. Finkelstein and his team obviously have connections in Russia, but are they going to be able to successfully produce for M-1 Global? That remains to be seen, but in the past, Vadim hasn't had tremendous success, although not terrible failures.

The press conference is set for 5:30 EST, I believe. I guess we'll find out more of the details very soon.