The North Carolina Bankruptcy Information Blog

Blockbuster Video, the ubiquitous blue-and-yellow beacon of home video rental, is rumored to be finally pushing play on a long-rumored bankruptcy.

It has been reported by several industry sources and the LA Times that Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes has been paying visits to Hollywood honchos with several golf carts full of restructuring consultants and senior secured-debt holders to discuss the status of his business and its more-than-likely pre-assembled bankruptcy. Blockbuster relies heavily on studio partnerships to provide new releases of big-budget movies. Access to these films is what has been keeping Blockbuster relevant, despite the rise of online rental companies like NetFlix, a model Blockbuster has been trying to emulate.…

He said he’d be back. He just didn’t know it would be as the result of a bankruptcy.

In a southern California bankruptcy court this week, a U.S. judge granted ownership of “The Terminator” movie franchise to a California-based hedge fund called Pacificor, LLC.

Halcyon Holding, the previous rights holder of the film series about an apocalyptic time traveling, hell-bent-on-assassination cyborg lost the right to assemble more killer robots last summer when it had to file for bankruptcy.

As we have discussed in other bankruptcy news posts, movie rights can be worth a lot of money if handled correctly. Some people have made generational fortunes by holding the rights to just a single Hollywood character.…

The traditional media industry is hurting. Specifically, hard news print vehicles, newspapers mainly, have been decimated by the rise of the Internet and a rapid decline in advertiser spending as a result of both new media opportunities and of course, the recession.

The most recent indication of America’s tilting favoritism toward all things online, the publishing parent of newspapers like the Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News is expected to petition for bankruptcy in the next few days. MediaNews Group, Inc. isn’t saying much about the details but those “in the know” believe it could happen as soon as Friday.…

If there ever was a sure sign that print advertising is drastically down from where it was only a couple of years ago, other than the slew of newspapers around the country that have either been sold, merged, closed or gone Web only, it’s the bankruptcy filing of R.H. Donnelley, a North Carolina-based publisher of phone directories. You know, the yellow pages. At one time, the single most ubiquitous business marketing channel.

The company originally filed for protection back in May of 2009. At the time, it was big news because of the company’s notoriety as one of the region’s most successful publicly traded companies.…

The recent bankruptcy of Capmark Financial Group, Inc., one of our country’s largest commercial real estate lenders, may just introduce the rest of the country to the problem Washington, the real estate industry, Wall Street and all other type of financial professional has nicknamed, “the other shoe.”

For a number of months, owners of commercial real estate have been scrambling to prepare for that “shoe” to drop. That is, in only a matter of months, office, industrial and multi-family (apartment) property mortgages are going to come due. And just like in the consumer banking world, the credit isn’t there to keep landlords afloat.…

It looks as if the sale of the Chicago Cubs will make it out of the bullpen and on to the playing field, after a bankruptcy judge approved the sale of the Windy City baseball team for $845 million. The family of billionaire Joe Rickets agreed to buy the team from the Tribune Co., which filed bankruptcy at the end of last year and along with the Cubs, owns The Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.

The sale will also include the iconic Wrigley Field, which the Tribune bought along with the team in 1980 for a mere $20 million.…