Darren has a 25-year track record in building and managing entertainment companies. Under his leadership as President and Chief Executive Officer, eOne has grown from a modest Canadian record distributor to the diversified global independent entertainment studio that it is today.
It was music that gave eOne its start – and serious scale.
“I was young, I loved music, and I’d just moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. I wanted to be in business. I wanted to build something…I couldn’t find the music stores that catered to the type of music I liked to listen to – so I started my own.”
Darren opened Urban Sound Exchange in Halifax in 1991 and built it into an independent chain of music stores with locations around Canada. In 1999, he sold the business to music and video retailer CD Plus, where he joined as VP of Operations.
For the next decade, Darren led the company in building and acquiring several music distribution ventures, including Records on Wheels. He became CEO of ROW Entertainment (ROW) in 2001. Realizing that the traditional business model for media sales and distribution was changing, he diversified its operations through a series of acquisitions, including overseeing the purchase of Video One Canada, Canada’s largest home entertainment company.
Aiming far and wide: the launch of Entertainment One.
In 2003, Darren took ROW public and then orchestrated the acquisition of Koch Records, at the time North America’s largest independent music label. The name was subsequently changed to Entertainment One.
With eOne’s comprehensive North American distribution network in place, Darren began aggressively acquiring the rights for specialty content. In 2007, to fund expansion into independent feature film distribution and rights ownership, Darren orchestrated eOne’s movement to London’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in a $200 million IPO.
Today, eOne is a talent-driven global organization that controls some of the most popular brands in the world including preschool-phenoms Peppa Pig and PJ Masks. The company’s network includes film and television studio MAKEREADY with Brad Weston; content creation venture Amblin Partners with Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks Studios, Participant Media and Reliance Entertainment; leading film production and global sales company Sierra Pictures; unscripted television leaders Whizz Kid Entertainment, Renegade 83, Daisybeck Studios and Blackfin and innovation lab Secret Location.
Throop directs a global cast of industry experts that share his end-to-end vision of actively acquiring ownership of content rights for exploitation across all media platforms worldwide. Throop was recently appointed to The Order of Canada for his innovative leadership in the entertainment and film industry and he is chariman of the IMAX Corporation Board of Directors.
At A Glance
- Appointed in 2003, Darren is an innovative global entrepreneur with 25 years of senior management experience in the entertainment industry
- Darren has been inducted in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and recognized as Entrepreneur of the Year by Grant Thornton for its Quoted Company Awards
- He is chairman of the IMAX Corporation Board of Directors
- A lover of all music genres, he has a soft spot for the hard stuff – metal!