Premium documentaries, co-productions and the changing streamer landscape are set to dominate next week’s Mipcom Cannes as thousands of buyers descend on the Croisette after three years off, according to a wealth of senior sales bosses.
In the lead-up to one of the most highly-anticipated markets for years, Deadline has spoken with Fremantle’s Jens Richter, All3Media International’s Louise Pedersen, Banijay Rights’ Cathy Payne, eOne’s Stuart Baxter and A+E Networks’ Steve MacDonald to assess the state of play before the October 17-20 event.
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Each was delighted to be returning in person after three years virtual — last year’s Mipcom was hybrid and pared back — and said there is a renewed optimism, negating the ‘market fatigue’ that has crept up in years gone by.
“People need people and this is a people business,” says Fremantle International CEO Richter. “My main priority is to connect with everybody. Being so remote has been hard for the past couple of years.”
For Banijay Rights CEO Payne, the market — due to be attended by more than 10,000 people and 3,000 buyers, according to organizer RX France — will finally be an opportunity for execs from Banijay and the old Endemol Shine Group to meet, with that deal having closed more than two years ago but in-person meetings completely stymied by Covid. “This really is time for us to demonstrate who we are,” she tells Deadline.
Meanwhile, All3’s international boss Pedersen says weeks of preparation have gone into this market. “We’ve had pre-market format pitches, clients coming through town and lots going on in the international offices, so this is way more than just a week but the culmination of lots of activity,” she adds.
The changing nature of the TV landscape was very much on the quintet of buyers’ minds and they back up Mipcom Cannes Director Lucy Smith’s comments last week to Deadline that the market is pivoting focus to co-productions and away from distributor-to-buyer sales. This year will see the introduction of a 1,000 sqm Producer’s Hub, encouraging indies to discuss upcoming shows with distributors and seek financing in a multitude of different ways.
Payne says “you won’t necessarily be closing traditional deals” at the market but it’s “good to see clients in person and take the industry’s temperature,” while eOne’s President of International Distribution Baxter believes buyers have become far more switched on to co-pros of late.
A+E’s MacDonald, who is President, Global Content Licensing and International, thinks this will be “one of the biggest Mipcoms in quite a long time,” with the main trend being “the opportunity to connect and be back together.” He will be using the market to reiterate A+E’s position as “a media group, not just a cable network” and is shopping co-productions including The North Sea Connection, Miss Scarlett and the Duke and A+E Korea’s If You Wish Upon Me, along with looking forward to A+E’s annual Women In Global Entertainment Power Lunch, hosted this year by actress and activist Alyssa Milano.
While each buyer extolls the virtue of returning in person, Baxter says “the world in which we are heavily dependent on markets and they take big chunks of our marketing spend” may be over. He prefers to view markets like Mipcom as part of a “three-legged stool” that also includes screenings of individual shows all year round and digital platforms.
Along with pushing the likes of fun format The Fast and the Farmer-ish, eOne is focusing on how to maximize the IP of owner Hasbro, which also owns the likes of Monopoly and Cluedo, and Baxter will be speaking to buyers about these opportunities.
Elsewhere, there will be a new player in town from the other side of the Atlantic in the shape of Fox Entertainment Global, which will see Fox’s return to the international distribution space unveiled at a keynote followed by cocktails on Monday night.
Premium factual and the search for authenticity
Premium factual and unscripted programing has been all the rave in recent months and distributors have been busy ramping up their slates, with Pedersen saying All3 has been across the trend for a while as the high-end drama boom pushed buyers to want documentaries of similar quality.
“We were lucky enough to have a lot of these already but it’s been a real growth area,” she says, pointing to the likes of high-end factual entertainment series like Studio Lambert’s Race Across the World and mysterious format The Unknown, which is being taken to market for the first time. On the drama side, All3 has high hopes for The English, the highly-anticipated Emily Blunt-starring Western from Hugo Blick that is having its red carpet premiere on Sunday with its stars in tow.
Fremantle is shopping the likes of BBC Two’s The Elon Musk Show, BBC Three/Hulu’s Planet Sex with Cara Delevingne and Channel 5’s Brian Cox: That’s the Way the Money Goes on the Croisette and the distributor’s week could be made a whole lot sweeter if it is able to find international homes after betting big on premium factual. Adding some further star quality, Delevingne will be attending and partaking in a Planet Sex panel with Fremantle UK CEO Simon Andreae.
Richter praises the “beautiful, phenomenal” archive-led Musk show and says “it feels like this is where the market is at now.”
“What’s brilliant about this premium factual space is that you can deliver series that feel like they are having the impact of a two-hour film across several episodes,” he adds. “If you have big topics like sex or poverty then you need special talent like Brian Cox and Cara Delevingne to promote them.”
In a world overwhelmed with content, heightened competition for audiences was a hot topic at the recent RTS London event and Richter says the push for the best premium factual taps more widely into the need for authentic programing to keep these audiences entertained.
“You can’t fake it anymore,” he adds. “The big trend across drama and factual is thinking about how there are so many platforms out there and so you need to make a show special and elevated.”
Richter points to Fremantle dramas such as East Side, from Shtisel producer Abot Hameiri, about an ex-Secret Service agent-turned-fixer in Israel who brokers shady property deals between Arab residents of East Jerusalem and Jewish groups, and Irish-Canadian co-production Sisters starring Sarah Goldberg.
For Baxter, viewers’ current penchant for “subbing over dubbing” is reflective of the new local programing era that will be felt at Mipcom in what has been a stellar year for shows not in the English language, led by Netflix’s Squid Game. This again taps in to the need to be authentic.
“No one thinks twice now about buying shows in local languages,” he explains, flagging Italian, Israeli and Spanish projects that sit within eOne’s catalog. “Shows are coming from places you wouldn’t expect and are travelling well.”
The search for authenticity has led to a raging debate around reboots, coming as shows such as Big Brother, Survivor and Gladiators are all given another go. This became a major talking point at the Edinburgh TV Festival and even led to a war of words between BBC Chief Content Officer Charlotte Moore and Channel 4 Program Director Ian Katz.
Banijay Rights’ 135,000 hour catalog carries many such formats including Big Brother and Payne, who is touting the likes of Starstruck, Love Triangle and MasterChef in Cannes, predicts the debate will be equally strong on the Croisette.
She dismisses the notion that reboots and the purchase of old formats represents lazy commissioning.
“Bringing back a format isn’t easy,” says Payne. “More reboots doesn’t mean there is less creativity out there but I think it does mean that it’s harder to launch a new format. You need to give these shows time to build and we live in a world where you’re often not given that time.”
Another major trend Payne expects to spend much time discussing is FAST channels, a new money maker for distributors who can exploit certain genres or formats within their catalogs via these services.
The French powerhouse already operates 13 such channels, including, most recently, Horizon, which hosts high-end dramas like Gunpowder and The Woman in White and sellable formats including Location, Location, Location and Pointless.
Fremantle is looking to match Banijay, according to Richter, seeking to launch around a dozen FAST channels in the U.S., UK and other territories over the coming year akin to its Baywatch channel, while Pedersen says: “FAST offers distributors the chance to give buyers a full service with scheduling, promotion and add-ons.” She cites a Midsomer Murders FAST offering that features voiceovers from former star John Nettles.
“The management of rights is really important with FAST and we’re well placed,” she goes on to say. “Everyone will be talking about FAST at Mipcom but we’ve been talking about it for two years and I feel like we are established.”
Streamer impact
No modern market could ever be devoid of conversation about the wealth of new U.S. streamers hitting the marketplace.
Some have raised fears that these streamers’ desire to ‘warehouse’ shows for their own platforms could have a negative knock-on effect on distributors but Pedersen rejects this notion.
“More buyers and partnership opportunities is a good thing,” she adds. “If anything this is balanced out to some degree by the rising costs of production. The risk in financing shows is something we think about a lot.”
A+E’s MacDonald says the plethora of new U.S. streamers gifts his outfit the perfect opportunity, as it is free to work with anybody and isn’t busy ‘warehousing.’
“Where other U.S. studios have zigged we have zagged,” he adds. “We feel fortunate not to be held back by having a platform that forces us to do what many other media companies are having to do. We can instead be agnostic with 1,500 hours of new content per year and an overall catalog of 30,000 hours.”
And local broadcasters are also fighting fire-with-fire by ordering even more shows to match the streamers, doing away with FX chief John Landgraf’s notion that we have hit ‘peak TV,’ according to Baxter, who says: “There was a huge bump of commissioning during Covid and I don’t see that slowing down.”
The new streamers such as Paramount+ and Peacock are still in their early stages and Payne says “we are still working out who is exactly doing what,” with more clarity hopefully coming at Mipcom. The newly-merged Warner Bros. Discovery is the perfect example, with a combined HBO Max/Discovery+ streamer launching next year to further shake up the market but the strategy still very much being ironed out. Much of Europe is still reeling from HBO Max’s decision to pull commissioning from most territories.
Bringing each of these trends together will make for fascinating chatter in the halls of the Croisette and distributors are ready, laden with programing.
As the world changes at lightning speed, one of TV’s biggest gatherings of buyers is getting ready to show what it’s made of once again.
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