Pinewood Shepperton film studio, home of the James Bond and Harry Potter films, today stole the show as its flotation on the London stock exchange raised £46.2m.
The company said it had sold shares at 180p each - at the top of the indicated price range - and added that the offer had been "comfortably over-subscribed". The offer price gives Pinewood a market value of £82.5m.
In conditional trading, Pinewood was up 7% at 192.5p. Full trading in the company will begin next week.
"We are delighted with the response from investors. Pinewood Shepperton is a household name in the film and television industry, and we look forward to developing our reputation as a public company," Michael Grade, Pinewood's chairman, said.
Pinewood plans to use the capital raised from the flotation to reduce its debts from £89.2m to around £45m, and to fund growth. The company said it had also agreed a new £60m banking facility alongside the share offer.
The company sold 27.7m new shares in the offer, and existing shareholders, including the UK venture capital firm 3i Group, sold a further 13.9m shares, worth around £25m. The shares sold represent 91% of the enlarged share capital of the company.
The studios, on the western outskirts of London, house 36 stages, television studios and post-production facilities.
The UK film industry's reputation for boasting highly-skilled film technicians, combined with government tax incentives for movie producers, has attracted a stream of big-budget Hollywood productions to the studios. They include the historical epic Troy, starring Brad Pitt, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Mr Grade has come under pressure to sell his 4% stake in the studio since being named as BBC chairman, a job he begins next week.
Rival studio operators have expressed concern that Mr Grade's efforts to separate his roles as BBC chairman and executive chair of the studio group will not prevent a conflict of interest.
Since Mr Grade led a consortium to buy Pinewood four years ago, later merging it with Shepperton, the studios have been aggressively targeting TV work. Among the programmes produced at Pinewood Shepperton are BBC hits My Family and The Weakest Link. Mr Grade is set to bank a windfall of almost £6m from the flotation.
The company was formed after a management team led by Mr Grade bought Pinewood studio from the Rank Group in 2000, purchasing Shepperton studio in February 2001.
Film production at Pinewood began in 1936, and the studio has since been the setting for more than 650 feature films including Great Expectations, Batman, Carry On Sergeant and 30 other Carry Ons. Pinewood is best known as the studio at which all 18 James Bond productions were filmed.
