Fremantle Execs on Growth in Their Film Business, AI, and the Trend of “Mainstream” TV

The trend of demand for “mainstream” TV series and growth in Fremantle‘s film business, thanks to the likes of Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer, starring Daniel Craig, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Pablo Larraín’s Maria starring Angelina Jolie were among the key topics of debate as executives from the production giant in Madrid on Wednesday on the second day of the fourth edition of Iberseries & Platino Industria.

Seb Shorr, CCOO, global drama at Fremantle U.K., Olivia Sleiter, head of production, global drama at Fremantle Italy, and Manuel Martí, head of scripted development at Fremantle Latin America appeared during a spotlight panel session.

“We have a good amount, I think now it’s 17,” Sleiter said about Fremantle’s growing film business. “It’s film for cinemas and films for TV as well.” Among others, she mentioned that Element Pictures, in which the firm owns a majority stake, has worked with Yorgos Lanthimos “and is now shooting his next movie.”

Shorr told the audience: “While we’ve always done a bit of film, really the last few years, we very much want that to be a really important part of our portfolio …and a major part of our business.”

He also addressed the current difficulties in the sector. “The market has been challenged and is challenged, and we’ve had, almost in every territory, the sort of perfect storm of production costs continue to go up, broadcasters are struggling and not putting what they would invest up,” he explained. “It has become more challenging to put the financing together on the series. That’s sort of a structural financing challenge that we’re seeing. At the same time, a lot of the buyers move towards what we would call mainstream, or a push for mainstream, mainstream, mainstream, and away a little bit from some of the prestige genres that, particularly the streamers, have been chasing in the last few years.”

Martí highlighted though that producers and networks can strive for mainstream content without having to dumb things down across the board but instead “add layers” to productions.

Shorr also shared what that means for Fremantle and other companies. “Our challenge, and the challenge for all of the producers, is to sit there and find the right way to respond to that need from the market, but also to respond to the challenging financing scenarios to put together the shows that can work” for broadcasters, while they “also can make money.” He concluded: “Broadcasters are all trying to cut their budgets, almost every broadcaster in every territory wants to spend less. That opens the opportunity back to co-production in a way that has not really existed so much in the last few years. And I think that is going to be continuing to be the big trend.”

Martin Freeman series The Responder is “a terrific show that we’re very proud of” but also an interesting case, Shorr offered. “It worked on the basis of quite a good U.S. sale that we had.” However, things would likely look different if the show was being produced now. “If we were making The Responder again, we would probably be looking at a lower cost, because we do not see the same market for it internationally, just because the way the market has gone,” he explained. “We greenlit that ourselves just out of the BBC and then waited for the U.S. sale. But I don’t think we would do that now because of the challenges in the market.”

The Fremantle team also mentioned Italian series Costiera about a half-Italian ex-marine, played by Jesse Williams (Only Murders in the Building, Grey’s Anatomy) who returns to the land of his childhood and takes up problem-solving in one of the most luxurious hotels in the world. “This is the show that we made for Amazon in Italy,” which was “I think the first time Amazon in Italy had done a co-production model,” Shorr said about the series that is set to debut next year. “They just took Italy, France and Spain. And we retained the rest of the rights” and then it around the world.

But Amazon ended up liking it so much that it ended up taking more territories. “It’s a very mainstream show,” Shorr said. “It’s sold really well. And interestingly, on that one, we’ve actually sold a lot of the territories to Amazon that they didn’t take initially because Amazon was so excited about the show.”

What are the Fremantle execs looking for in the future? “I’m excited about the market being better in a year or two,” Shorr said.

And Sleiter shared this on Fremantle’s reaction to the rise of artificial intelligence. “On AI, we have now made some specific working groups because we don’t want to suffer AI. We want to take advantage of what you can offer,” she explained. “Of course, [we will be] always taking into consideration what our talents want. We need to protect them as well. But of course, it’s something we’re really looking at. We will have some focus groups, and we will try as much as possible to share all the experiments we will start doing, and we will share [insights] with all the departments and all our labels.”

After all, “AI is not something for experts” only, she concluded. “It’s something that we can all take advantage of. And this is something we need to navigate properly.”