Paul Bronfman has joined forces with Ken Ferguson and made what looks to be a substantial, though undisclosed, investment in the latter’s Filmport megastudio, now under construction in Toronto.

The deal announced this week adds Comweb Studio Holdings, an offshoot of Bronfman’s Comweb Group, to the list of shareholders in the long-awaited studio, alongside a wing of real estate developer The Rose Corporation, the majority owner, and an unnamed company owned by Ferguson, who is also head of Toronto Film Studios.

Together, the shareholders will invest more than $30 million of equity capital into the project, the $60-million first phase of which is due to open next year.

‘Filmport is a well-capitalized and well-financed project,’ said Ferguson in a release. ‘We welcome Comweb as a shareholder and are excited about the bench strength we will gain with Paul Bronfman.’ The Comweb Group of companies includes equipment suppliers William W. White International and Sparks Camera & Lighting.

Bronfman tells Playback Daily that the deal took shape after TFS and its partner/parent Rose beat out Comweb and others for the rights to the megastudio project in 2004.

‘Even beforehand we said ‘If you win the bid maybe we’d like to work together,” and vice versa, says Bronfman. ‘It got serious a few months ago.’

The Toronto studio landscape has seen other changes this year, including the closure of Cinespace’s Marine Terminal 28 stage and news that U.K. giant Pinewood Studios Group plans to build five stages in Toronto, looking to open in fall 2008. Bronfman says he welcomes the competition, noting that his deal with Filmport was on paper ahead of the Pinewood announcement.

‘It was just a matter of consummating our deal. I was actually very happy that they’re going ahead with that project,’ he says, arguing that the proliferation of studio space will be good for the Toronto market, which is in a slump and has for some time lost a number of high-profile Hollywood shoots to Montreal and Vancouver.

Pinewood was, at one point, attached to an early version of the Filmport project, then known as Portlands, just as Bronfman was once a partner its would-be competitor, Great Lakes Studio.