Producers are targeting younger audiences and, in some cases, greenlighting projects themselves as they navigate a market in which budgets have declined but the number of TV movies being made overall has remained relatively stable.

Compared to other parts of the scripted production ecosystem, the TV movie business is, on paper, better equipped to weather the grueling commissioning contraction that has bruised huge swathes of the global content economy.

For starters, the projects themselves are comparatively inexpensive to develop and produce, making them a less risky proposition for buyers. Secondly, they are focused on evergreen genres like romance, true crime and female-driven thrillers, with the former often timed to coincide with Christmas or Valentine’s Day.

According to producers C21 has spoken with, the TV movie market has indeed been less affected than other areas of the business by the global downturn – but only to a certain extent.

Graham Ludlow, head of development and production at Montreal-based production company Incendo, says the TV movie market has been “somewhat insulated” from the downturn but per-project budgets have fallen meaningfully as buyers look to trim costs.

“If I think back to some of the movies I worked on in years gone by, the budgets were so different than they are now,” he says. “The buyers are still interested in commissioning, but the financing structure has shifted as the budgets have also contracted.”

For Incendo, one typical structure sees the company looking to secure an anchor commission in the US before taking the project to Canadian buyers and the rest of the world. Its TV movie credits include A Brush With Love, A Christmas Letter and A Love Yarn.

While Ludlow says most genres of TV movies have retained their appeal with audiences and buyers, true crime movies that are “very specific to a location or a place are a little harder to sell in 2024,” he says.

Most recently, Incendo revealed a strategic partnership with Meet Cute, an audio-focused company targeting millennial and Gen Z audiences, to adapt five audio properties spanning sitcoms, romcoms and mysteries for the screen.

Ludlow says the deal is indicative of two things: that existing IP is key for buyers in the TV movie space, and that the medium is making a grab for younger viewers.

One advantage of the partnership was that the audio scripts were already developed and, in some cases, there was talent already attached, notes Ludlow.

“We thought these would be interesting properties to take out into the marketplace and be able to say to more traditional buyers these properties have already proven themselves, these are the numbers that have come in from the audio world, now why don’t we look at this in a more traditional sense and do adaptations,” he says.

Part of the strategy was to tap into younger audiences, he says, something that appears to be top of mind for other major players in the space following the news that Hallmark is partnering with the NFL, Kansas City Chiefs and Skydance Sports on a Christmas romance movie. The project, Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story, is looking to capitalise on the real-life romance between Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce, which helped to make this year’s Super Bowl the most watched in history.

“As audiences and tastes change, and what you’re watching the movie on changes, figuring out how to corral those viewers and keep them as part of the viewing audience is really important,” he says.

That has meant producers are increasingly looking for influencers and content creators interested in making a switch to traditional film and television. This is, of course, not a new trend, but Ludlow says there is a growing pool of high-profile social media stars with legit acting chops.

Aren Prupas, president and CEO of Canadian production company Muse Entertainment (Single All the Way, A Tourist’s Guide to Love), says some aspects of the TV-movie business have remained robust – namely the buying appetite from Hallmark and Lifetime – while others have shrunk.

The internationalisation of the production business, coupled with the fact audiences are increasingly watching subtitled projects from other countries, is taking a bite out of the North American TV movie business, he says. “There’s significant competition internationally that can produce content at cheaper prices, and audiences no longer see North American content as the only source of entertainment,” argues Prupas.

That has led to sales declining in certain European markets, he divulges. “Our Spanish market for TV movies has cratered because [Spanish companies] have been buying German product and German TV movies. Does a Spanish person care if a TV movie comes from Germany or North America?”

These challenges are being compounded by the rising costs of production in North America, with post-pandemic production services continuing to be sky-high, coupled with increased talent costs related to the improved contracts won by actors and writers last year amid Hollywood’s double strike.

In his estimation, the “financing isn’t keeping up with the cost of inflation, whether it’s guild-mandated or even the cost of location or car rentals,” he says. “The margins are getting squeezed and, for local domestic producers, the best of them will survive this, but others won’t.”

With budgets going down, so too does the license fee paid to producers, meaning production companies need to churn out more TV movies in order to generate the same amount of revenue. “There are still jobs to go around, it’s just increasingly hard for the producer to come out with a reasonable return for their work and effort,” says Prupas.

One encouraging aspect is that the “volume is still there,” he notes, driven by the sector’s two biggest buyers, Hallmark and Lifetime, continuing to attract audiences and advertising dollars.

“Their audiences demand new content every year and so the advertisers are paying for those spots because they consistently rate. It clearly continues to work economically, so [the TV movie business] is insulated, but only to a degree.

“The truth is that ad sales are down across the board, and viewership is down, which is obviously a long-term concern.”

Scott Kirkpatrick, executive VP of coproductions and distribution at LA-based Nicely Entertainment (A Christmas Castle Proposal, The Holiday Exchange), says that amid a protracted industry contraction, producers and distributors are going it alone on several projects that in the past might have been greenlit by linear or streaming platforms.

“We’ve made a lot of changes, even as recently as 2023,” says Kirkpatrick, explaining that Nicely’s typical production model pre-2023 saw the company primarily producing projects fully financed or almost fully financed by linear platforms or streamers.

“That allows us to get a film made, we’re not overextended,” he says, “and in the past we could secure several commissions from a variety [of outlets] and know what our slate was going to be.”

That is no longer the case. “Instead of having, say, five movies commissioned by one partner, we might have two – and that is across the board [with all buyers],” notes Kirkpatrick.

That has meant Nicely is increasingly looking to develop and greenlight its own projects, in addition to acquiring distribution rights to third-party titles that fit into its slate of holiday, romance and family-friendly fare.

“We’re essentially greenlighting internally and overseeing the whole process,” he said, adding that in prior years, Nicely has done this with between two-to-five films. This year, it is “the bulk of our originals that we’re bringing to market.”

Of course, this model means the producer-distributor is assuming more risk. But at a time when commissions out of North America are down, many companies have few other options than to try and push projects into production themselves, if they have the means to do so.

It is not necessarily a permanent strategy shift, says Kirkpatrick, but one being taken while the market continues to be in a state of flux.

“Producing films independently means there is more risk. We are adjusting our budgets to be conscientious of that, at the same as not cutting corners by any means. We’re just doing it on our own now until the market figures itself out.”

Producers are targeting younger audiences and, in some cases, greenlighting projects themselves as they navigate a market in which budgets have declined but the number of TV movies being made overall has remained relatively stable.

Compared to other parts of the scripted production ecosystem, the TV movie business is, on paper, better equipped to weather the grueling commissioning contraction that has bruised huge swathes of the global content economy.

For starters, the projects themselves are comparatively inexpensive to develop and produce, making them a less risky proposition for buyers. Secondly, they are focused on evergreen genres like romance, true crime and female-driven thrillers, with the former often timed to coincide with Christmas or Valentine’s Day.
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