Thunderbird Entertainment
Canadian company

Thunderbird Entertainment, Inc. was a television and animation production company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. Founded in 2003 as Thunderbird Films, it produces scripted, unscripted, and animated programming for domestic and international broadcasters and streaming platforms.
With offices in Toronto, Los Angeles and Ottawa, the firm operated several subsidiaries, including Atomic Cartoons, Great Pacific Media, and Thunderbird Releasing.
On November 26, 2025, Blue Ant Media announced that it would acquire Thunderbird for $63 million; the acquisition was completed in January 2026, after which Thunderbird and its divisions were folded into Blue Ant Studios.
History
Tim Gamble and Michael Shepard founded the company in 2003 as Thunderbird Films. In its early years, it focused on television production and international distribution of Canadian programming.
In 2012, after receiving an investment from Lionsgate founder Frank Giustra, Thunderbird formed a joint venture with Lionsgate known as Sea to Sky Entertainment (named after the "Sea-to-Sky" stretch of BC's Highway 99, just as Lionsgate was named after Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge). The venture made deals with director-producer R.J. Cutler and author Dennis Lehane.
In April 2013, Thunderbird acquired Reunion Pictures, producer of Alice and Continuum.
“Thunderbird Entertainment” enters the record as canadian company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Thunderbird, Entertainment and Canadian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7799087. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003, 2025, 2026 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thunderbird Entertainment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.