When Lionsgate Buys Starz, It Has GOT To Make Starz Take Its Name

Big news in the world of media conglomerates today: entertainment company Lionsgate, home to such properties as Mad Men and The Hunger Games, is buying the premium cable network Starz. This is great news for Starz shareholders, but even better news for Starz, the brand.

I am not a crackpot. I just think Starz has GOT to ditch that name.

Starz launched in 1994 -- except, that's not really accurate; when it first went on the air, and for the next eleven years, it was actually "Starz!," with an exclamation mark, IF YOU CAN EVEN. One could argue that, even in the mid-'90s, using a "z" in place of an "s" was less "street" than "sad," but if the decision was made to let the consumer know Starz was the sassy upstart to HBO and Showtime's premium cable grande dames, that "z" definitely got the job done. When even high fashion could look like a Lisa Frank pencil case, maybe pluralizing with a "z" wasn't actually that gross.

However, a lot of things have changed since then -- chief among them the fact that Starz is not trying to attract viewers merely on the strength of its movies'...starz. It's made a very credible play over the past few years at creating its own fancypants original series, the best known of which is Outlander, but now also joined by the severe, thought-provoking The Girlfriend Experience and the watched-by-no-one-you-know-but-very-expensive-looking Black Sails. No matter how great a show Outlander is -- and it's a bonny one! -- it will never fail to jar this viewer to see the un-word "STARZ" in the lower right corner during an episode. It's just so...chintzy.

But now, here comes Lionsgate, galloping across the savannah, offering Starz the perfect pretext for a course correction. And okay, maybe Lionsgate isn't the most intuitive name a TV network ever had, but they don't all need descriptive names: what does Viceland or Spike mean, anyway? Lionsgate at least has the benefit of being named for something imposing and majestic -- the Lion's Gate Bridge in Vancouver, where the company was originally formed (in 1997, three years after the launch of Starz, and you'll note that no one there thought it was a good idea to call it Lionzgate). You can picture Claire Fraser bravely standing against her enemies at something called Lionsgate, or Christine Reade coolly sliding between the sheets in a suite at the Lionsgate Hotel, or the...Black Sails guys...crossing under...okay, I don't know what they do, but you can imagine them getting into a pirate battle with another ship with "Lion" or "Gate" in its name.

Starz is a name that was already corny the day it came into existence. Lionsgate is making a wise purchase of a company that's molded itself a bold new brand identity in the past few years -- and it would be even wiser if it sent the name "Starz" back to 1994 and made it live there with Ace Of Base. I am not a crackpot.