Robert Lantos is rehiring Charlotte Mickie and Tony Cianciotta to run an in-house movie distribution division at Serendipity Point Films, his film production shingle, Playback Daily has learned.

Both Mickie and Cianciotta worked at Alliance Communications (now part of Alliance Atlantis Communications) during the 1990s, when Lantos ran the film and TV prodco. Mickie was SVP of film sales at Alliance International, while Cianciotta was VP and GM of Alliance Releasing.

Mickie and Cianciotta are now being tagged with releasing Serendipity Point Films titles. Lantos last October cashed out a 50% stake in indie distributor ThinkFilm, which previously released his titles in Canada.

According to insiders, Lantos is busily laying the ground for a full-service movie-releasing division in-house, and will soon publicly unveil his new company. He was not available for comment.

‘He’s going the whole nine yards,’ says one veteran industry observer.

Mickie most recently headed up the Toronto office for Paris-based Celluloid Dreams, which recently merged with Hanway Films to form Dreamachine. She left Alliance Atlantis in December 2003 after the broadcaster shuttered its film production and sales divisions.

Cianciotta’s latest executive stint was overseeing movie acquisitions and distribution at Capri Releasing. Earlier, he left Alliance Releasing in 1997 to cofound Red Sky Entertainment in Vancouver.

Serendipity titles, including Norman Jewison’s The Statement and Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies, were previously released in Canada by ThinkFilm.

But that relationship ended after simmering differences between Lantos and Jeff Sackman, ThinkFilm’s founder and CEO, in part led to the company’s sale last October to Los Angeles-based film financier and distributor David Bergstein.

Launching Serendipity Releasing marks a return to festival deal-making and theatrical releasing for Lantos. He left the movie distribution game in 1998 when he sold Alliance Communications to rival Atlantis Communications and set up Serendipity Point Films as a boutique movie producer.

The expiration of a five-year non-compete agreement with Alliance Atlantis enabled Lantos to acquire a half-stake in ThinkFilm in 2003.

Lantos has also returned to TV distribution. He and former TriStar Pictures president Jeff Sagansky, who was CBS Entertainment president when Lantos ran Alliance Communications, recently made an unspecified investment in Blueprint Entertainment, the Los Angeles/Toronto prodco run by former Alliance employees John Morayniss and Noreen Halpern.

That cash injection was quickly followed by Blueprint, which has offices in Los Angeles and Toronto, securing an international pipeline for TV product through the acquisition of a majority stake in Canadian distributor Oasis International.

Launching Serendipity Releasing also comes as U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs & Co. gets closer to signing up a Canadian partner — likely a non-pension fund entity — to run Motion Picture Distribution LP, a rival Canadian independent distributor acquired as part of a $2.3-billion deal by Goldman Sachs and CanWest Global Communications for Alliance Atlantis Communications.