Participant, maker of ‘Green Book’ and ‘An Inconvenient Real truth,’ is shutting down

After 20 years, 21 Academy Awards and 18 Emmys, socially acutely aware film manufacturing business Participant is shutting down.

The Culver City company informed its workers Tuesday morning that it would be winding down functions.

In a letter to personnel, founder and former EBay president Jeff Skoll wrote that the decision was “difficult,” but that it was “the ideal time” for him to assess his subsequent chapter and strategy to “tackling the pressing difficulties of our time.”

“I founded Participant with the mission of making entire world-course information that inspires optimistic social transform, prioritizing effects together with professional sustainability,” Skoll wrote in the letter. “Since then, the leisure market has observed innovative changes in how information is made, dispersed and consumed.”

The organization declined to remark more further than Skoll’s letter. Skoll hadn’t been concerned in the company’s working day-to-working day administration for a variety of yrs.

Participant is recognized for films these as Oscar winners “Spotlight,” “Green Book” and the Al Gore environmental documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and the Oscar-nominated documentary “RBG,” together with sequence like “When They See Us.”

But like lots of independent producers it has faced a tough weather. The sector for unbiased, grownup-skewing fare has struggled to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic. Box place of work revenue continues to be considerably under pre-pandemic levels.

The organization obtained a standing for manufacturing information that would boost social fantastic, these as its attempts to boost legislation in Mexico that gave labor protections to domestic personnel, a campaign that happened alongside the launch of its Oscar-profitable film “Roma.”

Skoll stated in his letter that he was “emboldened” by other storytellers and articles creators who were making on the function Participant did.

“The ripple effects of Participant can be felt much and huge — what we have began alongside one another is just the commencing,” he wrote.