EXCLUSIVE: When Netflix leader Reed Hastings recorded an audio essay for the BBC last month, one comment was highlighted in his message of solidarity for an industry besieged by viral disruption: “During the pandemic, we noticed that our members see more content from other countries or cultures. . “
Streamers and their global success have shown in recent years that audiences will consume videos and outdoor television from their immediate experiences, and that the language barrier is no longer as pronounced as thought in the past. The Spanish screen Money Heist, the Italian drama Summertime and the German-American screen Unorthodox, whose call was verified through Hastings, are 3 series that have crossed national borders to be seen through a diverse audience.
And it’s not just a series. The good fortune of Korean essay and artistic drama Parasite, which amassed workplace records in markets around the world, earning more than $250 million before breaking into the Oscars this year, reaffirmed that the bridge between audiences and content, even on a theatrical stage, has shrunk.
It’s a formula in which Globalgate, subsidized through Lionsgate, has bet for years. Flying under the radar since its official launch in 2016, the global company identifies high-level assets in local markets that could possibly be able to be remade in new territories, and then transmits those homes to its network of established partners around the world (see below). create co-financing and co-production opportunities.
“We created this company because there is a great need for high-level assets in the world,” says William Pfeiffer, ceo and co-founder of Globalgate. “Local production companies and distributors are well aware of their intellectual asset resources in their own countries, but they do not have the success or ability to cross their borders to locate wonderful stories. You can’t make a smart movie without wonderful stories.”
The globalgate concept has been shown through a litany of successful projects that, from the outside, necessarily resemble apparent formulas of remakes.
Take the 2013 Mexican comedy, Instructions Not Included, which was a huge hit in the workplace, bringing $46 million to Mexico (it remains the most successful Mexican film in the country) and another $44 million in North America. Facilitated through Globalgate, the photo is now being redesigned worldwide, adding in France, where Two Is A Family of 2016 with Omar Sy and Clemence Poesy was a local hit, earning $23 million, before performing well in Italy ($7.8 million) and Germany ($6.9 million). ). André Moraes has directed a new Brazilian version of 2018, No Return Accepted, while filming is tentatively scheduled for the third quarter in a Vietnamese edition produced through the main Korean Lotte Entertainment (which has a workplace in Vietnam). Globalgate has also implemented the Turkish, Indian, Indonesian and Filipino editions of the property.
The examples also come with the good German fortune of 2013, Fack ju Gohte, which Globalgate first attempted to decide directly from the manufacturer Constantin for a new Spanish version, but discovered that the German company did not need components of its intellectual property. Instead, they returned with the proposal to co-produce the remake jointly. It has become the 2016 Mexican film No Manches Frida, which was Mexico’s fourth most successful film ($11.8 million) of all time before being surpassed by its 2019 sequel ($17 million). Miss Granny, a 2014 ruin in Korea ($58.2 million), has already been remade in the Philippines and China (through manufacturer CJ Entertainment), and now Globalgate has overseen a Mexican incarnation, now in post-production, and there is an English version. language edition produced in the United States through MGM.
The skill of wisdom percentage is the key to the structure of society. No Kids, a 2015 Argentine romantic comedy, is being performed in the disparate countries of Germany, Korea and Mexico. Globalgate is helping to adapt these individual scenarios by facilitating the exchange of data between local partners in the progression phase.
The company also runs more and more in series, such as the Mexican exhibition on Amazon El Juego De Las Llaves, which Globalgate is preparing for remakes around the world. Although the barrier between the short and long form is not important, as in Ditte-Louise, it was originally a Danish series but was remade in a feature film in his local Denmark through Globalgate’s wife Nordisk before the American company established an Englishman. language editing in Lionsgate UK.
Globalgate’s extensive partner network now includes 14 production and distribution corporations in more than 20 countries: Lionsgate (United States/UK/Canada/India/China), which is also an uncontrolled shareholder and provides administrative support, Televisa (Latin America), TF1 (France), Nordisk (Scandinavia), Kadokawa (Japan), Lotte (Korea and Vietnam), Tobis (Germany), Rai (Italy), TME (Turkey), Belgian Films (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), Paris Filmes (Brazil), CineColombia / Dynamo (Colombia), Viva Communications (Philippines) and Falcon Pictures (Indonesia).
Through its network, Globalgate has instant access to 21,000 library titles, as well as a view of your spouses’ long-term assignments, and your team continuously travels through this catalog to locate high-level assets that respond to existing market trends and have the ability to be remade. in new territories. Array After identifying an asset in a position to be remade, it takes the determined assignment to its spouse in a country where it may have potential, giving them the first rejection in a co-production and co-financing agreement.
“Every two months, we do video conferences with all our spouses, showing them advances in local films, etc.,” says Paul Presburger, co-founder of Globalgate, who is also CEO of our spouse Pantelion Films. “If they are interested, we help them negotiate the option agreement and retain the right to co-produce and, in all likelihood, to finance. If a local spouse is willing to invest in it, it gives us a lot of confidence to move. Forward. Actually, it’s piloted locally.”
“We know that every single film is released in every territory, large and small, even those where we don’t have partners,” says CHIEF Executive Clifford Werber.
If the spouse offers the option, the team will go to other manufacturers and packing agencies around the world with the idea. The company now owns more than 50 film and television houses in stages of development, pre-production, production and launch.
Once the new version has been opted for, with the local spouse infrequently funding the development, the local company will employ a manufacturer in the territory (or produce internally) and package the project, before returning it to Globalgate, which will then first have co-productions. and co-fi the 50/50 film. Instead of charging a commission on the initial agreement, the company relies on the functionality of those movies in their local markets (and more) to earn a lot of cash in the backend.
“There are corporations that the industry redoes rights; we don’t accept commissions, that’s not our game,” Werber adds. “A lot of these corporations need to come to us.”
Globalgate also analyzes the intellectual assets of books and non-durable scenarios, adding in the U.S. market, where scripts can remain on studio shelves and accumulate dust for years.
“I discovered a script called My Boyfriend’s Meds[from an American writer],” Presburger recalls. “We created a Mexican edition and published it in March, and we also proposed it to Pantelion to create local editions around the world. He is now in Gaumont, France, so they are preparing a French edition of this Hollywood situation he has never done in English.”
This is an investment of the most common approach of identifying successful foreign homes for American remakes [see The Upside, The Departed, etc.]. “The Holy Grail has a tendency to be ‘Hollywood will make a new version of my movie’, but it doesn’t work. Isn’t it better for something like Instructions Not Included to do between 7 and 8 editions worldwide, and then the Hollywood edition may come in the future? ? Producers can see their intellectual property used much faster,” Presburger adds.
“Hollywood sometimes captures the overall IP total to prevent other people from doing local language versions because the Hollywood movie travels very well,” says pfeiffer. “But you can make a film in Korea that has no effect on the Indian, Mexican or Italian market.”
So what’s the formula? Why did Parasite raise $250 million when Bong Joon-ho’s past films never approached that total? Why Perfect Strangers, a 2016 Italian photo, results in paintings in so many markets (the film holds a Guinness World Record as the maximum remade film never noticed in 18 and more versions).
For Meg Thomson, Globalgate’s senior vice president of global content, it is a unique authorship and cultural specificity, which looks good for a massive audience by homogenizing the subject (a normal complaint of the Netflix algorithm).
“People all over the world are in favor of the original voices,” he says. “Sometimes, the more expressive the filmmaker is, the greater his voice, that’s what a film like Parasite stands out.”
Thomson also believes that other people are interested in stories that reflect their own experiences, but do not necessarily have to come from their home country. “A Mexican story about a circle of relatives would probably be more familiar to a circle of relatives in India than to the United States, even if it’s in the other aspect of the world,” Pfeiffer adds. “There may be similarities in cultures.”
The fact is, however, that there is no plan for success: “When I was at Sony Pictures, we did Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [the Mandarin film grossed $213 million worldwide] and we thought we had cracked the code, but not necessarily the case,” Presburger says. “A lot of other people have tried to imitate that.”
The still-fluid nature of the public’s appetites will also need to be taken into account. Ordering and proposing a task from scratch is a procedure that takes several years, and knowing which audience you will see once production is finished is a guessing game. This procedure takes position much faster when the IP already exists.
“We do projects on demand,” Thomson says. “If you need a wedding film set on an island [a recent Globalgate request in Germany], we can set it up.” Thomson points out that projects that can be shot in a confined manner are in line with the times, due to the pandemic, and that Korean films are also fashionable because of Parasite.
“Koreans like remakes a lot, too,” he adds. “We put a lot of intellectual assets in position in Korea. Their ticket sales are booming, a lot can be done in a territory.”
To date, Globalgate has focused on movie titles, and several of its partners build movie stations on its territory. Hollywood content may still be a dominant force in theater markets around the world, however, many countries are seeing an increase in the percentage of local titles on the market. In the last count, the countries with the highest intake of locally produced values are India (90%), Japan (60%), China, Turkey and Korea (55%), France (40%), Denmark (30%) Germany. , Italy and Poland (25%).
However, as the top players in the industry, the pandemic has noticed that the team does more business with streaming services. And let alone that this rise in local language content has been facilitated, at least in part, through Netflix and Amazon.
“People all over the world can stream and can locate foreign, subtitled or dubbed content that they probably wouldn’t have discovered in their local theaters,” says Pfeiffer. “This opens our eyes to the quality of foreign projects and has something to do with Parasite’s success.”
“Our business is film oriented, but we’ve had conversations with streamers over the next year and it’s accelerated. A film we made with one of our partners had just finished production when the pandemic started. We were able to do that, however, with the uncertainty of the movie premiere, we made the decision to sell it to a streamer,” he continues. “There may not be a great chance of gaining theatre advantages, but we have secured guaranteed advantages for everyone involved.”
For years, a normal differentiator between Hollywood products and local dishes, at least talking about advertising titles, has been the price of production. This is changing, with structures of foreign co-professionals, developing local markets and investing in foreign content, which means higher budgets for foreign language projects. The production load in many of these territories is also much smaller, a fact that large studios do lose.
“A dollar can happen a lot more in foreign countries than in Hollywood. You can make a $20 million movie that looks like a $100 million movie from America,” Pfeiffer says. “With those higher production values, those projects can travel.”
Executives say Globalgate is interested in expanding its network. Growth has recently been concentrated in Asia and Latin America, and Argentina is very likely to be one of the next centers where the company will have a partner.
As Hastings’ quotes show, Globalgate’s paintings are aligned with the direction the company is taking as a total. Specific transmitters are aiming for expansion in foreign markets as they achieve subscriber levels in their English-speaking territories, and the pandemic has accelerated this process.
While the United States is grappling with virus spikes, foreign markets have already returned to production in particular and some have even noticed that cinemas are effectively rebooting. Korea, for example, has already experienced two versions of the pandemic era that attract more than one million admissions (Peninsula and #Alive). “The foreign market is the voice of COVID’s disruption recovery,” Werber says.
For Globalgate, developing the industry’s confidence and appetite for foreign products can be smart for business. “The foreign market place is a much faster development market place than Hollywood,” says Pfeiffer.
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