Sony-owned Who Wants to be a Millionaire rights unit pays £20m dividend

Who Wants to be a Millionaire is nearly 30 years old, and still paying out—just not to contestants.

The London Standard reports that Sony Pictures Television UK Rights, the UK company controlling the global format rights to Who Wants to be a Millionaire, paid a £20 million dividend after another profitable year for the franchise. The accounts (year to 31 March 2025) show the format still generates 82% of the company’s revenues.

Revenue rose 8.2% to £12.3 million, but costs surged, pushing pre-tax profit down 31% to £5.2 million, according to the Standard. Even so, the company sent £20 million upstream to its parent, Columbia Pictures Corporation, ultimately owned by Japan’s Sony.

This was the first dividend since a £15 million payout in 2021. Since Sony acquired the rights in 2008—via a £137.5 million purchase of Dutch producer 2waytraffic—the UK rights unit has paid out £258.6 million in dividends, the Standard reports. That is “almost double its money back” before counting whatever profits sit elsewhere in Sony’s structure.

The format remains globally ubiquitous: it aired in 45 territories last year, including 17 markets opened during a recent expansion push. Since 1998 it has been shown in more than 120 countries and inspired Slumdog Millionaire as well as the UK scandal dramatizations Quiz and the “coughing major” Charles Ingram saga.

Sony is not pretending this is about culture. The accounts cite “opportunities” in adding in-show interactivity and “off-air exploitation of rights” to the core licensing proposition. Millionaire Hot Seat, a spin-off hosted by Jeremy Clarkson, launched recently.

This is what the modern “creative economy” often looks like: not bohemian risk-taking, but IP as a financial instrument. A format—essentially a ruleset, a brand, and a licensing contract—throws off cash like a toll road. Meanwhile, governments across Europe continue to talk about “supporting creativity” through subsidies and industrial policy that often favors rights-holders and collecting societies.

Entertainment conglomerates lobby so intensely because the product is not a show, but an enforceable monopoly over replication. The contestants may still be asked “final answer?” but the real jackpot is the legal right to ask the question in the first place.