Fremantle measures seismic change on the Richter scale
LONDON TV SCREENINGS: In a market largely shaped by US streamer investment over the past few years, a pullback in spending and shift from subscription to ad-supported VoD has meant Fremantle has had to adapt swiftly, says CEO Jens Richter.
Jens Richter
“This is the most mainstream slate that we have ever brought to market,” says Jens Richter, CEO of commercial and international at Fremantle, reflecting on the company’s line-up for this year’s London TV Screenings.
The statement is perhaps somewhat striking, given that over the past five years of the event’s existence much of the talk has been about entertaining niche audiences – finding ‘tribes’ of rabid fans that rave about particular programmes to their social networks, evangelising to the benefit of the platforms that commissioned them. These days, all that has changed, says Richter.
“Five, six, seven years ago, we were at peak TV. There was a lot of money in the market. There was a lot of room for experiments. The streamers would serve niche audiences and that made producers and us come up with a lot of shows that were clearly targeting small audiences,” he says.
“You had Max coming in, you had Disney coming in, you had Starz coming in – you had a lot more demand in the market. These platforms started with zero subscriber bases, essentially, and therefore, they started very premium. Now, some have already left the market – look at Starz, they’re not in Europe anymore. Some are now at 300 million subscribers, so they went mass audience.”
From Lux Vide comes Costiera for Amazon Prime Video, starring Jesse Williams
The great ‘Netflix correction’ of April 2022 – when the world’s leading streamer revealed a surprise plunge in customer numbers and plans for the introduction of advertising – also had a major impact.
“Now, the world has moved on. Now there is no more SVoD,” says Richter. “Other than Apple, everybody sells advertising. These platforms are going mass market and essentially competing with the likes of ITV, TF1 and RTL, so the demand is for more mainstream shows that focus on driving bigger audiences.”
The exec says Fremantle spied this shift early on and has been working hard with its production partners to come up with shows that fit the new market environment. “That’s why there’s a very clear focus on IP, on cast, on wider stories, narratives, action, adventure, thriller, crime, procedural – all these elements that help to engage with bigger audiences.”
He picks out a few examples from the company’s slate, which it will be unveiling to London TV Screenings buyers today: Sandokan is a new adaptation of Emilio Salgari’s historical novels about a fictional 19th century pirate, made by Italian subsidiary Lux Vide for Rai and Mediaset España and featuring among others Can Yaman, Alanah Bloor, Ed Westwick and John Hannah; also from Lux Vide is Costiera, a procedural for Amazon Prime Video starring Jesse Williams as an ex-marine who winds up as a ‘problem-solver’ in a hotel on the Amalfi Coast.
Iris stars Niamh Algar and Tom Hollander
He also highlights Iris, a Sky Studios/Fremantle thriller, also filmed in Italy, from Luther scribe Neil Cross starring Niamh Algar and Tom Hollander; and Little Disasters, a psychological thriller from Roughcut Television for Paramount+ in the UK and Ireland.
What’s interesting about the latter, as well as Costiera, says Richter, is that in each instance the respective commissioning streamer only took local or regional rights – indicative of greater flexibility in dealmaking, no longer the need to take worldwide ownership or indeed in perpetuity.
“There’s a lot more openness to collaborate,” he adds. “And so there’s opportunity for us to bring several partners to the table to make shows happen.”
This is, of course, also a result of the fact that the industry has experienced significant contraction, in part as a result of being in the post-peak TV era but also advertising decline and the ripple effects of the US writers and actors strikes. High-level consolidation – such as Warner Bros Discovery and now Skydance-Paramount – has also created uncertainty.
“The US market slowed down dramatically over the last two years,” says Richter, and the impact on the UK in particular has been pronounced – as evidenced by testimonies from a number of high-profile producers at a government inquiry into the nation’s high-end TV market last month. Among them, Jane Featherstone, CEO and co-founder of Sister – maker of series including Chernobyl, Eric and Black Doves – complained that distribution advances have “collapsed” in this scenario.
“From the producer’s point of view, it probably looks like a collapse, but from the distributor point of view, we needed to adapt the level of minimum guarantees to a new market environment,” responds Richter.
“The necessity of driving wider audiences makes it hard for some shows to be sold. Sometimes we’ll look at a show and we don’t believe it has a big market anymore because it feels too local to a current international audience. The fact that it’s done well for a British broadcaster in the English language with an amazing cast isn’t enough anymore.
“Three, four years ago, you could go into the US and pre-sell a lot of British drama; you could sell finished tape. There was lots of demand in the market. That slowed down, which has clearly had an impact on the kind of minimum guarantees we can bring to the table now.”
Sandokan is a new adaptation of Emilio Salgari’s historical novels
Richter notes there is still huge interest in UK drama on the global stage and its talent base is second to none, as can be seen by the country’s showing any year at the Oscars, for example.
“When you look at who’s winning the awards, the UK is clearly over-indexing,” he says. “The challenge is that over the last couple of years, the cost of production shot through the roof, and for some productions, for some stories, the cost is just becoming too high [for them] to be made.”
In such cases, he notes, the question then becomes is there a way to bring the costs under control, or whether the show can be done in a different way.
“All broadcasters and all platforms have to focus on their bottom lines now and so they have to make shows with less money,” Richter says, and suggests that in the past some may have been “a little bit too UK-centric.”
“If you want to sell a really expensive UK-centric show, then the UK broadcaster has to come up with the majority of the financing. ITV did that beautifully with Mr Bates vs The Post Office. They were very public and clear that it was a show they really wanted to do, and they were fully aware of the fact it probably wouldn’t sell too well around the world because it was a very local scandal, and it didn’t.
“That is what you need to do if you want to tell a local story. In the UK in the past couple of years, we’ve been lucky that the US has been a very healthy market, and you were able to sell drama [there] that might have appeared to an American audience as rather niche at very high fees. When you take that same drama into the US now, you won’t get a buyer.”
Of course, Fremantle isn’t only about drama and the company is world-renowned for entertainment formats like Got Talent, Idol, Family Feud and The Price Is Right – all of which ensure strong ongoing relationships with commercial broadcasters around the world.
There are daily soaps too, points out Richter, though the cancellation of Neighbours in Australia recently – for the third time in its 40-year history – after Amazon pulled out of a renewal with Network Ten came as a major blow.
Returning to the London TV Screenings, however, the exec is heartened that the event has become such a success since the “founding mothers and fathers” used the annual BBC Showcase as an “opportunistic” platform launch.
“We said, ‘OK, let’s come together and do a screening following that showcase using the fact that all these buyers are coming through London’. That’s how it started and now it’s a huge event. This year, we’ve never seen so many buyers coming in.”
As to the future of the event and indeed the global distribution landscape should two of those founding members – All3Media and ITV Studios – end up merging, as has been suggested, there’s not much to be said right now. “We’re going to see,” says Richter. “Changes will always happen in the market, right?”
