You can almost hear Brian Grazer shouting at his publicist: Where’s my valuation story? Indeed, Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment this week joined the breathless media reports touting the potential sale prices of independent production companies. Never mind that Imagine, which Variety suggested could be valued at some $800 million, has been talking to various potential buyers since at least 2017. A24, another of the supposed acquisition targets (for “as much as” $3 billion!), has also been on the block for awhile. Goldman Sachs was even talking about trying to take the indie film/TV company public pre-pandemic, according to banking sources. (A24 declined to comment.)

Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine is apparently worth $1 billion. Lebron James and Maverick Carter’s Springhill Entertainment is a relative bargain at $750 million. Legendary Pictures has gotta be worth waaay more than that, the thinking goes. The Rock, Ava DuVernay, the Obamas—all own hugely valuable production companies now, right? Go ahead and pencil in Jason Blum’s Blumhouse and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot for eleventy billion each. If this is indeed a gold rush, no one wants to be left without a pickaxe. It’s gotten so frenzied, one agent described to me having to talk an actor-producer client off a ledge, explaining that no, those numbers are probably not real, and even if they are, a media report is not an actual sale.