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Weinstein ‘accelerates’ move into TV

MIPCOM: The “shrinking” movie business and a surging appetite for high-quality productions has led The Weinstein Company to “accelerate” its television operations, co-chairman Harvey Weinstein told delegates here in Cannes.

The Weinstein Company, best known as an independent film producer and distributor of titles such as The King’s Speech and The Artist, has TV credits including reality franchise Project Runway and drama The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.

It is now “accelerating” its TV production with new programmes including reality shows VH1’s Mob Wives and Lifetime’s Supermarket Superstar, and forthcoming scripted period series Marco Polo, which is slated to air on US premium cable network Starz in 2014.

“TV has become so exciting,” Weinstein said. “The Starz, the Showtimes, the HBOs, the BBCs and Canal+, all these networks around the world have really engineered some fantastic programming on an international level and on a domestic level.

“You can do exciting things in television. There’s an audience for it and there’s an appetite for it. The movie business is shrinking to some degree and I think we have to look for new horizons. It’s exciting to do new things.”

Weinstein said his company is “really getting into reality TV in a big way,” and through a partnership with American Idol host Ryan Seacrest, it is also pushing further into the scripted space.

His movie The Nanny Diaries, starring Scarlett Johansson, is now being developed for TV at US network ABC, while cablenet FX has also bought a crime drama Weinstein described as “like Entourage meets a private detective agency.”

“At the end of the day, good stories rule everything,” Weinstein said. “It’s content. You can have 3,000 channels and find nothing to fill them with. There’s no reason to go to a channel unless there’s a great programme. More of a premium should be placed on content and the work that a lot of independent producers do. That equation needs to be more equitable for the independent producers out there.”

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