Mass Producing European Cinema: Studiocanal and Its Works 9781501327124, 9781501327117, 9781501327094

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Studiocanal and an Era of Studio Building in Contemporary European Cinema
Part One The History of European Studios and Studiocanal's Place Therein
1 The Bones that Litter the Shore: A Brief History of Integrated, Pan-European Studios
2 Le Studio Canal Plus as "Dumb Money": Working within Hollywood and Building a Library, 1990-99
3 Surviving Jean-Marie Messier and Vivendi Universal: 1999-2006
4 Once More into the Breach: International Expansion, 2006 Onwards
Part Two Studiocanal's Works, 2006 Onwards
5 The European Studio as Creative Force: Defining and Analyzing Studiocanal's Output
6 Studiocanal's Mining of the Middlebrow
7 Studiocanal and Popular Genre Cinema and Television
Conclusions: Studiocanal and European Studios Then, Now, and in the Future
Appendix 1: International Films and TV Dramas Made by Studiocanal, 2009-17
Appendix 2: Film and Television Drama Projects Developed by Studiocanal, 2006 Onwards
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Mass Producing European Cinema

Mass Producing European Cinema Studiocanal and Its Works Christopher Meir

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Christopher Meir, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. vi-vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Film: Paddington , StudioCanal / TF1 Films Production / DR Photos Laurie Sparham / Collection Christophel / ArenaPAL www.arenapal.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Meir, Christopher, author. Title: Mass producing European cinema: StudioCanal and its works / by Christopher Meir. Description: New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018059748 | ISBN 9781501327124 (hardback: alk.paper) | ISBN 9781501327100 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501327094 (epdf) | ISBN 9781501327117 (xml-platform) Subjects: LCSH: Studio Canal+—History. | Studio Canal—History. | Motion picture studios—Europe—History. | Television production companies—Europe—History. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.E8 M45 2019 | DDC 384/.80654—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059748 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2712-4 PB: 978-1-5013-6810-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2709-4 eBook: 978-1-5013-2710-0 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgments

vi

Introduction: Studiocanal and an Era of Studio Building in Contemporary European Cinema

1

Part One The History of European Studios and Studiocanal’s Place Therein 1

The Bones that Litter the Shore: A Brief History of Integrated, Pan-European Studios

17

Le Studio Canal Plus as “Dumb Money”: Working within Hollywood and Building a Library, 1990–99

50

3

Surviving Jean-Marie Messier and Vivendi Universal: 1999–2006

72

4

Once More into the Breach: International Expansion, 2006 Onwards

93

2

Part Two Studiocanal’s Works, 2006 Onwards 5

The European Studio as Creative Force: Defining and Analyzing Studiocanal’s Output

125

6

Studiocanal’s Mining of the Middlebrow

152

7

Studiocanal and Popular Genre Cinema and Television

180

Conclusions: Studiocanal and European Studios Then, Now, and in the Future Appendix 1: International Films and TV Dramas Made by Studiocanal, 2009–17 Appendix 2: Film and Television Drama Projects Developed by Studiocanal, 2006 Onwards Notes Bibliography Index

209 216 219 223 227 244

Acknowledgments Undertaking a study such as the one that led to this book has naturally meant incurring many debts of gratitude. First, I would like to thank Katie Gallof and her team at Bloomsbury for their steadfast and cheerful support throughout the long process of getting this from proposal to a finished book. I am also grateful to the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine for the granting of a sabbatical and for allowing me additional leave to take up a fellowship of which I will say more shortly. UWI’s Faculty of Humanities and Education also generously supported some of this research with a grant from the Campus Research and Publication Fund. During my years on leave, my colleagues Natasha Callendar, Lynnessa Parks, and Yao Ramesar covered much of my teaching load and I am grateful for their assistance. Mandisa Pantin helped transcribe several research interviews and helped out with many other tasks in her capacity as my research assistant. Finally, Nareeba Seenath and Kivonne Ramsawak provided other forms of technical and administrative support during early stages of the project. It was my great fortune in 2015 to be awarded a UC3M CONEX Marie Curie Fellowship at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, where the bulk of the research and writing of this book took place from my actual arrival at the university in 2016 onward. At UC3M, I have benefited enormously from the intellectual community of the University as a whole as well as the TECMERIN (Televisión-Cine: memoria, representación e industria) research group housed in the Department of Journalism and Audiovisual Communication in particular. While this book has obviously benefited from the many resources bestowed by the fellowship, the human support offered by TECMERIN was much more valuable. I am particularly grateful in this regard to Josetxo Cerdán, Miguel Fernández-Rodríguez Labayen, Concepción Cascajosa, Vicente Rodríguez, Trinidad García, Luis Albornoz, Francisco Utray, Manuel Palacio, and Carmen Ciller. Also of great assistance throughout the project have been Sara Cervilla, Marta Rodríguez, and Raquel Navalpotro in the University’s CONEX office as well as the Department of Journalism and Audiovisual Communication’s support staff Álvaro Fuentes and Marisa Iglesias. Beyond my various academic homes during this project, my work also benefited greatly from innumerable conversations, discussions, and other forms

Acknowledgments

vii

of intellectual exchanges with a list of scholars too great to reproduce in its entirety here. That said, I would like to thank among many others two scholars in particular whose advice would prove pivotal in the direction of this research and ultimately the book itself. These are Andrew Spicer and Colin Burnett, both of whom provided decisive advice and enthusiastic encouragement at crucial moments. I would also like to thank Nathan Townsend for his close readings of the manuscript and the passages on Working Title Films in particular. Versions of the research contained in this book have also been published in two publications over the last several years. These are “Studiocanal and the Changing Industrial Landscape of European Cinema and Television,” which appeared in Media Industries and “European Cinema in an Era of StudioBuilding: Some Artistic and Industrial Tendencies in Studiocanal’s Output, 2006-Present,” which appeared in Studies in European Cinema. I am grateful to both publications for providing me with the permissions needed to reproduce this research in this book. Finally, this project would have been unimaginable without the personal support of many friends and family members around the world. Friends whom I would like to acknowledge in this regard include Elizabeth Jackson, Greg Fitzgerald, Malini Guha, and Brian Stewart. A special mention must also be made of Giselle Rampaul, who was a great friend and colleague for many years before passing away in tragic circumstances. I would also like to extend special thanks to Elena Casasole and Paolo Maietta, who not only lent me the use of their apartment during a very difficult period of writing, but who have also helped me and my family to feel at home in Madrid in ways that only good friends can. My biggest debts, perhaps unsurprisingly, go to my family. Laura OrtizGarrett was uncomfortably pregnant on the cold December night in 2011 when we went to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, when the idea of this project first occurred to me. The next seven years would see us move between three countries (on two different continents and an island), live in five different homes, lose a beloved pet, and gain two daughters. Through it all, she had been characteristically enthusiastic and unflagging in her love and support. I dedicate this book to our daughters, Soledad and Maite, with love and gratitude for all that they have brought into our lives.

Introduction: Studiocanal and an Era of Studio Building in Contemporary European Cinema1

Making it something of a commercial annus mirablis for European cinema, 2014 saw the release of four features produced and/or financed by European companies that grossed over $200 million at the international box office. These included two features from the celebrated French studio EuropaCorp: Lucy (Luc Besson), which grossed over $450 million globally,2 and the third installment of the company’s wildly successful Taken franchise, Taken 3 (Olivier Mégaton), which made over $320 million. Another Liam Neeson action film was released earlier that year, Non-Stop (Jaume Collet-Serra), making over $220 million. Finally, Paddington (Paul King), the first big screen adaptation of the eponymous children’s books, made over $260 million. Each of these two films were financed, sold internationally, and distributed in several key international markets by Studiocanal, the production and distribution arm of French television company Canal Plus. Besides its two major hit films, Studiocanal could also boast one of the most important television dramas in recent British history as one of its products, as the gritty police thriller Happy Valley aired that year on BBC One to rave reviews and large audiences. The drama was produced by Studiocanal’s British subsidiary Red Productions and was the first new series to emerge from the company following its acquisition by the French studio in 2013. Even if EuropaCorp’s features initially drew more journalistic attention and indeed more attention from audiences than any individual work from Studiocanal, it is the latter company that is actually best placed to illustrate the fundamental changes going on in European cinema in the 2010s. Studiocanal, formerly known as Le Studio Canal Plus, has been a fixture on the international film scene since the early 1990s and the 2010s found the company enjoying growing influence within the international market for films and, increasingly since 2012, television drama. Three years after the release of Paddington, the film that cemented Studiocanal’s reputation as a global studio, the company has released the second film in what is sure to become a family-film franchise. This

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release was the tip of the proverbial iceberg, however, for Studiocanal in terms of its production activities, one of the six features released in 2017 along with nearly 200 hours of television drama made in several different languages. Near the end of the 2010s, the company can look back on nearly thirty years of attempts to make itself into a global film and television studio with some assurance that it has finally reached a point of relative stability after years of wildly oscillating fortunes. This book will offer an overview of the historical development of Studiocanal from its founding in 1990 up to the present period, showing the many ways in which the company and its unique but emblematic history can illuminate a number of fundamental changes in the global film and television industries. Paramount among these changes is the flowering of globally oriented European cinema in the 2010s, a period that has seen the emergence of several European studios that integrate production and distribution while expanding into multiple national markets. In so doing, the book will not only detail Studiocanal’s corporate development, but will also offer critical studies of the many films and television series that it has helped to produce. It is hoped that this combination of in-depth study of individual works with more general chronicling of the company itself will help the reader to appreciate the dynamic interrelationships between the industrial contexts of screen production and the works that end up getting made within such contexts. Equally important will be the question of what these developments mean for the idea of European cinema and European television drama as art forms that may or may not be distinct from the American production that dominates global markets. Given such a growing presence in world markets, the book will also ask what types of representations of Europe and Europeans these works present for global consumption. In providing such analyses, this book hopes to contribute to the growing body of scholarly work that takes some of its inspiration from an influential essay by Tim Bergfelder (2005b) and sees European cinema and television not in terms of distinct national contexts, but instead seeks to look at what connects European nations. Such recent work includes publications such as books on European cultural policy (Bondebjerg, Redvall, and Higson 2015), television drama (Bondebjerg et al. 2017), and a recent collection edited by Mary Harrod, Mariana Liz, and Alissa Timoshkina (2015), which is explicitly concerned with what constitutes “Europeanness” in the cinema. This book will both build on and engage in dialogue with some of the key findings of these projects as well as the long history of writing about Hollywood and Europe, much of which has

Introduction

3

been concerned with the political economy of the European media industries. The book will equally take inspiration from the great deal of film historiography dedicated to examining historically important studios, adopting the methods and assumptions inherent in works such as Tino Balio’s definitive studies of United Artists (1987a and b) and Alisa Perren’s study of Miramax and the 1990s (2012), among others. Works such as these have shown the rich potential in corporate-oriented historiography, and it is to be lamented that no such studies have been undertaken in English of the important corporate players in European film history. By focusing on one particular company, this book hopes to bring new perspectives to bear on the very idea of European film and television, both of which are often prone to being understood only through their products and the role that some artists—particularly directors and stars—play in shaping them. Why the particular company in focus should be Studiocanal and not other important studios such as Pathé or EuropaCorp will be addressed as this introduction proceeds, but I would like to make it clear that European screen studies would benefit greatly from closer attention being paid to any and all of these companies.

Building scale in the European screen industries: Vertical integration, international expansion, and horizontal integration To set the stage for studying Studiocanal, we can return once again to 2014 and examine some aspects of the industrial backdrop for the many successful works that emerged from Europe in that year. In some ways, these films were the culmination of years of increased production activity on the continent, which was now seeing over 1,000 films produced annually, spurred on by lower production costs enabled by digital technology and a relatively generous policy environment across the continent. The problem for European cinema up to this point, however, has been that audience interest has not been commensurate with this prolific output. Even with the four very successful films mentioned at the outset, the overall picture for European films was not good in 2014 or in the years since, which have not seen nearly as many high-profile successes. The vast majority of the European films released annually are not seen in theaters or on digital platforms and few of those that are released theatrically are picked up for distribution in countries other than their own. The reasons for this are multiple,

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but suffice it to say that many stem from the persistent and fundamental separation in European cinema between production and distribution. As David Puttnam, among many others, has pointed out, many resources in Europe are directed at getting films made but fewer are earmarked for getting them seen, with even otherwise savvy business minds not fully appreciating the importance of distribution when it comes to making screen industries sustainable (1997, 327). Compounding this problem is that distribution is something at which the Hollywood studios excel, allowing them to effectively control much of the European market for film and television, meaning that profits even from much indigenous production is filtered back to these US-based companies. This is perhaps the most important difference in the recent wave of European hits: among European filmmakers there is greater attention than ever before being paid to questions of distribution, particularly outside of a single state. EuropaCorp proactively started its own distribution operation in France in 1999 in order to capitalize on the success of its productions in its home country. Additionally, the company had long been developing international distribution connections including relationships with independents throughout the world for some of its smaller releases (e.g., The Family [Luc Besson, 2013], etc.), as well as with Hollywood studios for its more ambitious projects, including the Taken series (distributed internationally by Fox) and Lucy (distributed internationally by Universal Studios). Looking to grow beyond this dependence on the majors, the company sought to utilize its profits from these films to build a distribution operation in the US market, through which it would henceforth release ambitious projects such as the reboot of the Transporter franchise (Transporter Refuelled [Camille Delamarre, 2015]) and the most expensive film ever produced by the company, or any nonmajor studio for that matter: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Luc Besson, 2017) which carried a reported production budget of $180 million. While this subsidiary would prove to be short-lived, closing down after only about fifteen months in operation and before the release of Valerian, it nonetheless demonstrated the company’s understanding that profits for European firms lie in international distribution. This was something that the other company involved in the English-language hits of 2014 was keenly aware of. With a long history of investing in production without much to show for it in the way of financial returns, Studiocanal had reinvented itself beginning in 2006 by methodically building a distribution network that by 2014 reached five countries: the UK, France, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. Possessing such a network allowed the company

Introduction

5

to more directly profit from its films and in so doing the company was hoping to integrate production and international distribution in a way that had proven elusive to many of its predecessors in Europe. Studiocanal and EuropaCorp were not the only contemporary companies attempting such vertical integration with a multinational distribution network, a strategic drive I have elsewhere termed “confederating” distribution territories (Meir 2016a, 55). Indeed, Pathé had been pioneering such a model since the 1990s, combining exhibition holdings across France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands with distribution operations in those countries as well as the UK and production activities in the UK and France. With such a design, the company had financed a number of high-profile films including Oscar winners Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008) and The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006), as well as commercial successes including Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, 2002) and the Camping franchise in France, among others. Arthouse sales agents Wild Bunch, who had since the company’s beginnings in the early 2000s integrated international sales, French distribution and production activities, had also by the mid-2010s expanded into international distribution, owning equity stakes in companies in Italy (BIM Distribuzione) and Spain (Vértigo). They would push this model even further in 2015 by merging with German distributor Senator to form a distribution network in five European markets (Germany, Austria, France, Spain, and Italy). Finally, over the course of the late 2000s Entertainment One built a distribution network that encompasses the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands as well as a direct-to-video operation in the United States. Starting from the historical position of lacking vertically integrated corporations functioning on an international level, European cinema could by the late 2010s boast no less than four, with EuropaCorp for a while acting as a fifth.3 Additionally, single-nation companies were becoming more sophisticated in the ways in which they utilized international sales agents, helping to make films like Serial (Bad) Weddings (Phillipe de Chauveron, 2014) (sold by the sales arm of broadcaster TF1) and many others including notable films such as The Intouchables (Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, 2011) (sold by Gaumont) and The Impossible (J.A. Bayona, 2012) (sold by Lionsgate) into international successes on an unprecedented scale. The Intouchables for example grossed over $400 million internationally, a total unheard of for Francophone films, while The Impossible grossed nearly $200 million around the world. European producers were thus finding many ways to access global markets, markets which have

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been in turn growing rapidly over the last twenty years, with the opening up of Eastern Europe in the 1990s and more recently Asian markets including China. Besides these international film successes and the related expanding distribution networks and sales relationships, another fundamental change in the European film industry during this period was that these companies— with the exception of Pathé—were not only making films. In addition to Happy Valley and the syndicated series Crossing Lines (TF1 and AXN, 2013– 15), Studiocanal’s television subsidiaries would soon be producing hundreds of hours of drama annually including major hits such as the Netflix series Las chicas del cable  /  The Cable Girls (2017–), the acclaimed French series Baron Noir (Canal Plus, 2015–), and the groundbreaking multi-platform queer-themed series Cucumber, Banana, and Tofu (Channel 4, E4 and online, 2015), among others. EuropaCorp likewise turned to TV production with spinoffs of their Taxi (Taxi Brooklyn [NBC 2015]) and Taken (NBC, 2017–) franchises, among other English- and French-language series. Entertainment One, meanwhile, had long been active in this segment of the industry, having produced and distributed the children’s series Peppa Pig (2004–) since 2009 among other series, and having expanded greatly during the 2010s, acquiring US television producer the Mark Gordon Company, makers of Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005–), Ray Donovan (Showtime, 2013–), and others, while signing numerous other producers to first-look distribution deals.4 In total, Entertainment One has produced and distributed over 200 hours of television annually during this period and that total is only growing as the era of “peak television” drives ever greater demand for scripted series. Wild Bunch for its part moved into television drama in 2015 with its backing of Medici: Masters of Florence (RAI, 2016–), which proved to be a major ratings hit in Italy and subsequently sold to broadcasters around the world. Additionally, the company has acquired a number of other titles from Spain, Israel, and elsewhere for international sales. Besides these instances of horizontal integration by pan-European film companies, numerous other European firms have become very active in this type of production and distribution. French producer/distributor Gaumont has financed Narcos (Netflix, 2015–), Hannibal (NBC, 2013–15), and other Englishlanguage series. British broadcaster ITV has acquired a range of producers in recent years in both the UK and the United States. And BBC Worldwide is among the most powerful and prolific of television distributors in the world, with titles such as Sherlock (BBC One, 2010–) and Doctor Who (BBC One,

Introduction

7

1963–) among their many international hits. All of these corporate maneuvers come as veteran, successful film producers and directors, ranging from Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino (writer-director of The Young Pope [HBO/Sky/Canal Plus/RAI], 2016) to The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2012) producer See Saw Films (behind Top of the Lake [BBC Two, 2014–] among others), increasingly become involved in television production. Europe has, of course, a long history of film and television being intimately linked, with the latter for a long time being the main source of the former’s funding, but this new relationship is different. If there was once a fear that television’s involvement in film financing would dampen the artistry of cineastes, now television is becoming the medium that is most associated with artistic freedom and ample financial resources. While this book will have more to say about this trend, and perhaps even a fundamental shift in the relationship between the media, suffice it say for now that corporate trends in Europe are both reflective and constitutive of broader global media trends. The end result of this is that we now have studios in Europe that are both vertically and horizontally integrated and which also have international aspirations to boot. Looking at these developments from a broader point of view, we can see these companies as developing the sort of structures that could potentially one day make them as sustainable and influential as the American studios that have long dominated the world markets for cinema and television. Such a development demands that we reexamine the long-running saga of US–European industrial relations and rivalry. Such a reexamination, of course, must involve revisiting some of the long tradition of scholarship surrounding that rivalry.

The national, the regional, and the global in European cinema historiography New trends in European cinema and television can usefully be placed in dialogue with those writers who have attempted to provide historical overviews of the larger relationships between Hollywood and Europe, or who have provided seminal histories of key producers and film companies on the continent. This is a long tradition that encompasses writers such as Thomas Guback (1969), Kristin Thompson (1984), Klaus Kremeier (1996), Thomas Elsaesser (2005), Mike Wayne (2002), and David Puttnam (1997), to name just a few. As this book unfolds, particularly in the next chapter but also throughout, my debt to these

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writers will become apparent, but for now it is important to flag up some of the most pressing issues that have arisen across this body of historiography. Much of this writing is unsurprisingly concerned with tensions between the national, the regional/continental, and the international/global. These categories are handled differently by each writer, but uniting all the corpus of European cinema historiography is an equation of the “international/global” with “American.” This may be problematic in many discussions of global versus local in Film Studies generally, but in the specific field of film industry studies, this equation is neither problematic nor inaccurate, until very recently in history anyway. Put crudely, the American market from the European point of view for much of film history has been, if not the entirety of its international market, then at least by far the largest and most important segment of that market. As Thompson shows, Pathé may have had forty-one international distribution offices in the 1910s (1984, 5), but the US market was nonetheless the source of 75 percent of the profits made by European producers in the prewar period (1984, 20). So when Wayne or Puttnam talk of the follies of multiple European firms in trying to conquer the international market, by doing so they invariably mean the US market and this does in fact correspond to the intentions of any given firm in this long history. The reasons for this are clear, the US market has long been the largest market for film and television products in the world and remains so to this day even with the rapid growth of the Chinese theatrical market, but as we’ll see the extent of that domination has been shrinking and this diminishing importance (and therefore less easy equation of “United States” with “international”) is making for a fundamental change in the global media industries, one which I will argue in subsequent chapters is crucial to understanding the rise of Studiocanal and its peers in the contemporary industry. But we must be cautious in the claims we make for these shifts in the balance of the world film and television economy as the United States remains the dominant market in many ways and sales and distribution there are still thus a major strategic priority for all film and television studios. Of course the world of cinema is much bigger than just the United States and Europe and one can therefore sympathize with Elsaesser’s claims that the Hollywood versus Europe debate in film theory is in many ways obsolete (2015, 17), but for understanding the industrial dynamics of cinema and television in Europe, it nonetheless remains a vital line of inquiry. The idea of Europe as a regional/continental concept is one that is more difficult for writers on European cinema to agree upon. For most of its own history, European cinema historiography has equated the term with the cinemas

Introduction

9

of Western Europe and then combined this geographic bias with tendencies to focus on individual national cinemas (a tendency critiqued in Bergfelder’s aforementioned essay [2005b]). Opposing such a fragmented approach, Dyer and Vicendeau (1992), Eleftheriotis (2002), Wayne (2002), and Bergfelder (2015), among others, have utilized comparative methodologies that look at common themes, problems, or other tendencies as they manifest themselves in different national contexts. Other writers have looked at pan-European institutions such as film festivals (e.g., De Valck 2007), policy regimes (e.g., Bondebjerg, Redvall, and Higson 2015; Liz 2016), or the circulation of specific texts among European audiences (e.g., Jones 2017; Redvall 2016) as ways to explore the idea of a possible pan-European cinema and television. At the risk of appearing to sidestep this crucial issue of what binds ALL European nations together, this study will not be directly concerned with European identity as such (see Liz 2016, especially 9–28 for such a discussion). Instead it will be concerned with how Studiocanal and other companies are making films and television series whose business plans seem to rely on the existence of such an identity and therefore produce and acquire works that they believe will speak to a pan-European audience. It should be noted at the outset that Studiocanal’s current distribution configuration is by design focused on northern and western European markets (with Australia/New Zealand being strategically considered as virtually the same in cultural terms as Britain [Darmon 2015a]), with films being licensed to third-party distributors for what are the traditionally politically marginalized and economically less-developed European nations in the southern (e.g., Spain and Italy) and eastern (e.g., Poland and Russia) parts of the continent. The company at the level of its business model thus attempts to capitalize on what Elsaesser has described as the one enduring aspect of Europe that makes it relevant in contemporary world cinema: its size as a market (2005, 47). The three European markets in which Studiocanal currently operates are the three largest on the continent and indeed are three of the largest in the world, particularly when one takes into account ancillary markets such as home video and television, which remain underdeveloped in Asian markets such as China and in Latin America as well, where piracy is rife and there is generally little besides theatrical revenues to be obtained from film releases (Tartaglione 2014). That size as a market has ensured Hollywood’s interests in building up and maintaining its distribution infrastructure on the continent, as it has in virtually all the world.

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Distribution, production, and critical “Europeanness” It is this distribution capability that has long given Hollywood its power, as numerous historians and analysts have argued, to control both exhibition and production by proxy (e.g., Puttnam 1997; Wayne 2002; Miller et al. 2001; Wasko 2003). As we will see in the first chapter, this distribution capability has meant that many European producers have sought Hollywood partners as a way to ensure global commercial success. Moreover, many filmmakers in the contemporary European industries likewise seek out the local affiliates of the majors for national distribution due to those firms’ dominance of individual national markets across the continent (see Brannon Donoghue 2014 for a discussion of this practice in Spanish and Latin American contexts). Crucially for this book’s historiographical questions, many writers in the political economy have implicitly and at times explicitly posited the question of what would be different if a company working outside of the Hollywood power structure could gain and maintain a significant foothold in international distribution (e.g., Puttnam 1997, 349–59; Wayne 2002, 6–7). As we will see in the book’s first chapter, many companies have tried and failed to do just that or in some cases had obtained that foothold but not reinvested the profits from that position into production. With the current landscape being populated by several companies in precisely such a position, we can now see what happens when this idea is finally put into practice. It should be noted, however, that not all of the companies involved in the latest trend toward confederation in the European film distribution business are equally involved in European film production. Like the Rank Organization before them, Entertainment One is an example of a company that has realized the potential of Europe (and other markets such as Canada and Australia/ New Zealand) as a market for films without investing much of their revenue into European-themed or produced films. Aside from the occasional local British feature (such as David Brent: Life on the Road [Ricky Gervais, 2016]), or internationally oriented features like Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood, 2015) and Message from the King (Fabrice du Welz, 2017), the vast majority of Entertainment One’s distribution slate consists of acquisitions (i.e., films it did not finance) or films obtained under the company’s many output deals with American producers such as Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks/Amblin or Annapurna Studios. All the companies involved in this new confederation trend do to some extent acquire other companies’ films for release in their own distribution territories,

Introduction

11

and Studiocanal itself is no exception. In fact, the French company currently has two output agreements in place to distribute the productions of American mini-major Lionsgate in Germany and Australia/New Zealand. These deals have meant that Studiocanal has dedicated some of its resources to managing the release of the Hunger Games franchise in Germany and the John Wick films in Germany and Australia, among others. But what makes Studiocanal unique, and vitally important for this book’s concerns, is that among this new crop of companies it is the one most invested in original production, to a greater extent even than Pathé or the more high-profile EuropaCorp. By virtue of its investment in financing or co-financing between five and ten internationally oriented features, and numerous local-language films in Germany and France every year since the mid-2000s, while producing many hours of television drama since 2013, Studiocanal is the company best positioned to demonstrate what impact a European-based studio might have on the European screen industries. Moreover, it also has a long history of making investments of other kinds and can therefore provide multiple insights into the historical challenges of European studio building in different periods. It is therefore one of this book’s most important tasks to examine Studiocanal’s production relationships. Despite its position as a pan-European company, most of these relationships are with American, British, and northern European companies (particularly in France, Belgium, and Scandinavia), with exceptions only to be found in Spain. Calling Studiocanal a truly “European” studio is thus somewhat problematic but the company does brand itself as such and its films and television series are disproportionately popular in European nations, even if like all media companies there is a clear desire on the company’s part to sell its wares in every possible market in the world, including the United States and across Asia. This does not mean, however, that we should accept Studiocanal’s branding at face value and it will thus be vitally important that we critically examine the relationship between Studiocanal’s products and Europe. Such an examination will be one of the main objectives of this book, which in addition to the historiographical traditions discussed above also draws on the ideas of critical transnationalism as articulated by scholars such as Mette Hjort (2010) and Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim (2010) as guides for analyzing the political economy of the European screen industries during the periods under examination here. As all three writers have shown, transnationalism as a critical concept in Screen Studies has for a long time been deployed in a problematic fashion. More specifically, their complaints include the ways in which the term

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is used with a worrying degree of imprecision, meaning seemingly anything that any given author wanted it to or at best an unnecessary synonym for “global” or “international” (Higbee and Lim 2010, 10). A further, and perhaps more pernicious problem for the authors is the ways in which the term lacks any political or historical rigor. As Hjort puts it, “there is nothing inherently virtuous about transnationalism and there may even be reasons to object to some forms of transnationalism” (2010, 15). It is therefore incumbent on scholars to assess the precise nature of any given transnational arrangement. We cannot thus simply accept and thereby tacitly celebrate Studiocanal’s growing international strength as a producer and distributor. We must instead ask critical questions about its influence on European cinema in light of the traditional political concerns of national cinema analysis regarding national/European representation and identity, indigenous industrial development, and the inclusion of national/ European artists. These are questions that will be implicit in Part I of the book, when Studiocanal’s history as a financier of mainly Hollywood films is discussed (Chapter 2) as it will be when examining the Vivendi Universal years when the company began to take on a more European orientation (Chapter 3), an orientation that grew into a new business plan after 2006 (Chapter 4). These questions will, however, become explicit in Part II of the book when the works of the post-2006 period are discussed at length as outcomes of these changes in corporate strategy.

Corpus and research methods It is precisely because of its international focus that this book is interested in Studiocanal. The company was explicitly founded by Canal Plus as a way to intervene in international markets and its income has for much of its history disproportionally come from outside of France, some 80 percent in recent years (Roxborough and Richford 2016). It should be noted, however, that the company does have a long history also of making products for the local market in France as well as more recently in Britain and Germany, with plans said to be afoot to make local films in Australia as well (Windsor 2017). This book, however, will not be concerned to any great extent with these locally oriented efforts. Chapter 5, which outlines the corpus that the analytical section of the book will take up, will clarify which of the local productions will be covered in the study, but in brief any films made in the French language and all but

Introduction

13

one of those made in the German language (Heidi [Alain Gsponer, 2015]) is the exception) will be excluded from this study. British local films are slightly harder to distinguish from their more globally oriented counterparts by virtue of having been made in the English language and therefore open to export in ways that the French and German language films are not. All television series made and sold by Studiocanal are subject to analysis here, regardless of language and the reasons for this—which are tied up in the changing economics of television drama—will be further detailed in Chapter 5. Instead of examining Studiocanal’s local dimensions, it is the relationship between Studiocanal and the global market that this book is interested in. From the outset that relationship was assumed to mean supporting Hollywood productions, but in more recent years, with the company’s move into European and Antipodean distribution, that relationship has altered and become more about trying to appease a market that is assumed to be pan-European. Charting this changing understanding of the global by the company will be a key part of this book’s project, as will be analyzing what products emerge from that understanding. This latter reason forms the methodological rationale for including case studies of films and television series in all chapters except Chapter 1 which covers the broader history of European studios. Not only do case studies of key works help to ground broader observations about Studiocanal and illustrate its strategies at various times, but they will also hope to make the book’s findings more tangible and accessible to students and researchers of film and television history who may be more accustomed to working with texts rather than the contextual factors that shape those texts. In so doing, this approach is also an attempt to realize John Thornton Caldwell’s argument that “one of the best ways to understand political economic and industrial practice is to understand the texts and content that the media industries produce” and vice versa (2008, 238). A final point about research methods to be raised at the outset of this study pertains to access to Studiocanal itself. Throughout the research carried for this book I received very limited access to employees of the company itself. In fact, I was only able to interview one employee: Audrey Darmon, then head of Business Development at the company, who in addition to answering my questions also provided me a written overview of the company’s operations (2015a and b). As helpful as this interview was and as grateful as I am for these materials, more access to other employees would have been ideal from a historiographical point of view. I was able to supplement this interview with several interviews with producers

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who have worked with the company on various projects, and these are cited at appropriate points throughout the book. All other information on the company has been gleaned from journalistic reporting on the company, particularly in publications oriented toward industry professionals: in other words the trade press. As Kenton Wilkinson and Patrick Merle (2013) have argued, the trade press is a potentially rich resource, but one which must be handled with care “to avoid perpetuating myths or unwittingly advancing corporate public relations endeavors” (425). With such a warning in mind, I have attempted to absorb the factual content that can only be gathered from these kind of sources, what Wilkinson and Merle call the “granular details” of the operations of the industry (416), while avoiding simply reproducing their analytical conclusions, which are very often skewed to the public relations agendas of the companies involved. This is particularly important in my discussion of projects that the company has in development, projects that can only be learned about in such publications. This is a point I return to in Chapter 5 in more detail. It is important to note that Wilkinson and Merle’s advice can equally be applied to interviews with industry professionals. In all cases, it remains incumbent on the scholars of the media industries to read their sources against the grain and I hope that what follows will reflect my determination to do just that. With this larger contextualization of the contemporary historical moment in the European screen industries and these provisos about the book’s scope, aims, and critical methods in mind, we can now begin to look at Studiocanal itself and the films and series that the company has helped to produce and the company’s place in European film history. Such an exploration begins with the historical contexts vital to understanding the company’s activities. It is thus to the bigger picture of industrial relationships between European firms and Hollywood that we now turn.

Part One

The History of European Studios and Studiocanal’s Place Therein

1

The Bones that Litter the Shore: A Brief History of Integrated, Pan-European Studios

In examining what could either be an epochal shift in the history of the European screen industries or, given some fragility that remains apparent in the sector, the latest false dawn in a long tradition of European flame outs, this book will look to build on the considerable historiographical work done on Europe’s position in the global screen industries and its putative rivalry with Hollywood. By all accounts, this is relationship has been decidedly one-sided, with Hollywood eventually winning out over whatever promising European organization sprouted up at whatever moment in film history. This account will not contest this general historical trajectory—it is after all an objective fact that these companies have failed and the Hollywood majors have persisted and profited from the failures of its rivals—but it will seek to do more than just recount each failure. Instead, while building on the conclusions of other historians about these various illfated ventures, this account will also seek to stress the relationships between the present and the past. This will mean at times simply flagging up moments in the past that will be relevant to actions of Studiocanal that will be discussed later in the book, and other times it will mean more extensive discussion of particular problems that are significant for understanding other companies on the contemporary European scene. This chapter does not claim to be a survey of every important European media company that has ever existed. Such a project would have to include the major state and private television broadcasters that eventually expanded into film production and some cases distribution, companies such as Italy’s Mediaset or Britain’s ITV and the BBC. Instead, this is a chronicle of pan-European (i.e., with marketing ambitions in more than two countries, crossing linguistic lines in the process), vertically integrated (to varying degrees combining operations in production, distribution, and/or exhibition) firms that challenged for portions of the global market. The time period will run from the very beginnings of cinema up until the 1990s when

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Studiocanal itself and its eventual parent company Vivendi joined this tradition, each in turn making their own calamitous errors, errors which are detailed in the two chapters that follow. As such, this chapter will encompass a historical period of roughly one hundred years and in many respects it tells a story that is by now familiar within film history. Indeed, the only company that will be discussed at length which has not yet been examined to any significant degree by film historians is PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, one of the most important companies of the 1990s but also one which has been curiously neglected in studies of that period. Other than this section, the chronology of firms under discussion is a familiar one, including Pathé-Freres as well as UFA, the Rank Organization, and producers such as Carlo Ponti, Alberto Grimaldi, and others. All of these companies have been objects of analysis to some extent or another by historians such as Richard Abel (1994), Kristin Thompson (1984), Thomas Elsaesser (2000), Tim Bergfelder (2005a), Mike Wayne (2002), and others and I will hope here to synthesize and build on those historical accounts to argue that the contemporary moment as epitomized by Studiocanal’s activities can and should be understood in the larger historical contexts (and the power dynamics therein) that writers have been assessing throughout film history. What Studiocanal’s output and trajectory as a company tells us in light of that context will thus be a major question guiding the book as a whole. That all said, we can begin this account of corporate European cinema history with the very beginnings of the cinema itself.

Pathé and the race to control the world film trade before the First World War There may be debate still over whether Thomas Edison or the Lumiére brothers invented the first cinematographic machine, but European companies can legitimately claim to have invented the modern film business, or at least the version that came to dominate the global film industry for much of the twentieth century. Charles Pathé was correct in two of his most famous quotes about his pioneering Pathé-Freres corporation that came to dominate the global film trade in the 1900s and 1910s. “I may not have invented cinema, but I industrialized it” (quoted in Abel 1994, 9) aptly describes the ways in which Pathé’s innovations of vertically integrating production, distribution, and (in some parts of the world) exhibition would not only make his company the dominant force of the early

The Bones that Litter the Shore

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film industry, but it would also set the industrial model that the largest American companies would follow during and after the First World War. His more selfdeprecating statement that his company’s dominance “rested solely on a head start” vis-à-vis his competitors (quoted in Thompson 1984, 5) also accurately indicates how fortuitous his company’s timing was in realizing the commercial potential of the new medium in the early 1900s. Pathé began building his global infrastructure in 1904 and by 1907 had a dominant presence in virtually all the developed markets of the time (Abel 1994, 23). He then engaged in a price war with Edison and by 1906 controlled between one third and one half of the US nickelodeon market (24). In 1907 his company invented film distribution as we now know it by switching from sales of film prints to rentals and pioneered the practice of block booking, making exhibitors commit to renting a program of films predetermined by the distributor, even if they hadn’t seen the individual films or if indeed they did not yet even exist at the time that exhibitors made the commitment to rent them (33–34). This innovation would not only make Pathé a great deal of money; it would also make distribution the dominant segment of the industry, more important than either production or exhibition (34). With this “head start” and his business acumen, Pathé would eventually have distribution offices in forty-one countries before the First World War (Thompson 1984, 5). The cornerstone of this global empire would be the company’s US business. The US market was then, as for the entire history of the global film market, the dominant territory, owing to its size and economic prosperity. Edison’s anxiety at the market dominance of foreign firms led to the filing of intellectual property lawsuits against them, including Pathé, a strategy which was not in the short term successful. More successful was his formation of a cartel of film producers in 1908, the Motion Picture Patents Corporation, which had the General Film Corporation as its distribution arm. At this point, Pathé set aside his differences with Edison and joined the MPPC, and his company along with Kleine Optical were then the only firms allowed to import foreign films under original makeup of the cartel, though Gaston Méliès was later given a license to import his and his brother Georges’s works (Thompson 1984, 17–18). Kleine for its part largely traded in the works of French producers Gaumont and UrbanEclipse (17). The decision by Pathé and others to join the MPPC was the first in a long line of European partnerships with US “competitors” to maintain (in this case) or gain (in others) US market share, thus foreshadowing the great amount of collaboration that is actually found in the history of European “competition” with US rivals right up until the present day.

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If Pathé’s innovations in distribution helped to build his empire, his attempts to keep innovating in this regard also proved to be his undoing. Unlike other European firms, his business was sufficiently globalized in terms of production (much of which was taking place in the United States) and sales (all over the world) to avoid being crippled by the First World War (Thompson 1984, 59), but Pathé made a serious mistake by changing his approach to integrating production and distribution. Having created a vertically integrated system that could have allowed him to keep stars and artists under binding contracts and thereby follow the studio model that would dominate the interwar period, Pathé opted instead to get out of the production business and concentrate solely on distribution, planning to distribute the works of independent producers in a model taken from the book-publishing industry. This would prove to be a disastrous strategy and the company would lose ground to its American rivals and would eventually be bought out in the early 1920s by its American executives. Thompson describes this as the loss of “one of the last chances any foreign firm would have to establish a significant and lasting hold on the USA” (1984, 60). Puttnam blames this miscalculation on Pathé’s supposedly misguided attempt to cultivate “an aura of gentility and refinement” with the prestige of a literary business model (1997, 75). Leaving aside these speculations about Pathé’s personal reasons for this move, we should at least point out that the idea was far ahead of its time in a way that mirrors the innovations to the distribution market that originally helped make the company a global power. In making his company one that only acquired titles for distribution, Pathé was opting for a more conservative business model that would be favored by independent distributors later on in film history. In such a model, the distributor takes less of a chance on each title, acquiring rights for certain territories often only after the film is completed. While this makes for smaller returns than full ownership of a film that is globally popular, there is still substantial room for reaping financial rewards. This could be seen most pointedly in the 1910s in the case of Adolph Zukor’s very successful importing of two European films in the US market: The Passion Play (Ferdinand Zecca, 1907) a Pathé production and Queen Elizabeth (Henri Desfontaines and Luis Mercanton, 1912). The success of these acquisitions1 in the US market helped to lay the financial foundations of what would become Paramount Studios (Abel 1994, 54; Puttnam 1997, 70–71). In a more contemporary instance of the same practice, as Perren (2012) has shown, such a business strategy was enormously successful for Miramax in the 1990s, for example, as much of the company’s success and reputation rested on

The Bones that Litter the Shore

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purchases of titles such as The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) and The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) before making its own fully owned hits such as Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994). The problem for Pathé at this juncture was that he was too far ahead of his time. The times demanded a higher risk approach that allowed for studios to ensure a high volume of high quality production. Lacking this, Pathé’s American business was fatally undermined. Decentralized production and the publishing model of distribution would not be truly viable as a basis for a large-scale studio until after the Second World War when, as Tino Balio has shown, United Artists (UA) perfected the model after years of struggling to fill its own distribution pipeline with films in the 1920s and 1930s (1987a). Being ahead of one’s time is generally thought of as a good thing in artistic practice, but it is not always such a good thing in the business world and Pathé thus committed an unforced error which set in motion a tradition of sorts of European participation in the world film industry that has been by turns visionary and at times prone to grave miscalculations. This question of balancing risk at the level of distribution will be a consistent problem for European studios that integrated production and distribution. Some like Pathé opted for too little risk to be competitive or to make meaningful contributions to European production. Others, by contrast, have opted for too much risk, distributing too high of a ratio of their own, often increasingly expensive products. This will thus be a motif in this chapter and one of the key questions for the current crop of would-be studios that attempt to manage their own balance of acquisitions and original productions, arguably being too aggressive in some cases (e.g., EuropaCorp) or too conservative to be meaningful producers in others (e.g., Entertainment One). Where Studiocanal lies on that spectrum will be a question for us to consider later on in this book. While Pathé was the foremost integrated European studio in this period, it is important to take note of the most popular European production trends that marked the period. Not only did these play vital parts in sustaining smaller challengers to the MPPC (most notably the Sales Company which attempted to form a duopoly over US distribution with the MPPC’s General Film Company), but they also set important artistic precedents and arguably even templates which studios of the future would utilize in their pursuit of the American/ international market. The most important of these—such as the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth but also Dante’s Inferno (Francesco Bertolini and Adolfo Padovan, 1911), Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1912), and others—consisted of works which helped to drive film form toward the narrative feature while also

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lending the medium the cultural legitimacy that would transform it into the mainstream, middle-class-friendly institution it would become. This has been documented extensively by others such as Thompson and Abel, so it hardly requires full recapitulation here. Instead what needs pointing out is the ways in which these films, often associated with the films d’art trend of the time, made use of European history and literature and combined these elements with popular elements such as melodrama and visual spectacle. This combination helped to create a middlebrow product that was simultaneously culturally legitimate to bourgeois society and appealing enough in the best cases to draw large-scale audiences. The formative successes of these films helped set a mold that many later globally successful European films would emulate, including titles ranging from The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, 1933) to Howards End (James Ivory, 1993) to Life Is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997). Moreover, if we broaden this understanding of the high-brow cultural elements associated with European culture to include the later figure of the auteur director or the European “quality” actor (a big selling point for Queen Elizabeth was its star turn by theatrical legend Sarah Bernhardt), we can see this dynamic of middlebrow cinema including a wide variety of global European hits including the in part director-driven Last Tango in Paris (1973), made by Bernardo Bertolucci, or the Isabelle Huppert–starring Elle (Paul Verhoven, 2016). As we will see, the middlebrow film will be very important for European studios throughout film history, including the contemporary moment.

UFA’s global project, 1917–33 While Pathé pursued its individual course, the First World War destroyed much of Europe’s production infrastructure and American films filled the void, swamping the continent with products that would make audiences forever associate the very idea of cinema with American films. As Thompson points out, by the postwar period the barriers to entry for the global film industry had grown rapidly and it would require a major outlay of capital upfront for any potential studio to hope to compete (1984, 14). The German government, witnessing the propagandistic potential of the medium that was increasingly controlled from America, provided such a substantial upfront investment in 1917 in the form of a secret investment in Universum Film AG, henceforth known to the world as UFA. Like most of the companies being discussed in this section, UFA’s story has

The Bones that Litter the Shore

23

been chronicled extensively by others (e.g., Kreimeier 1996; Elsaesser 2000; Hardt 1996) and for this reason I will simplify that story somewhat to focus on three phases in the company’s history. These revolve around the change in ownership in 1927 when Alfred Hugenberg rescued the company from insolvency only to later surrender ownership of the studio to the Nazi government. The period from 1917 to 1927 was marked by some of UFA’s most famous works and for a brief period gave the world a glimpse of what could be possible with a global European studio. Not only did films such as Madame Dubarry (Ernst Lubitsch, 1920) and Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (Fritz Lang, 1922) help keep the US market open to European imports by virtue of their commercial success—Kreimeier credits the former as one of the films that formed a “beachhead” for German films in the United States (1996, 58)—but they also displayed artistic innovations that would mark an extension of the branding of European cinema as a higher cultural form than American cinema. Under the stewardship of production chief Erich Pommer the studio would continue to churn out important films in both commercial and artistic terms, in the process giving a platform to European artists including directors Fritz Lang, F.  W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, and others as well as stars such as Emil Jannings, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich. Pommer’s support for his artists meant a general indulgence of budget overruns. This overspending, combined with lower profits from international sales caused by the currency shifts which were in turn caused by the stabilization crisis, combined to make UFA hemorrhage cash in the mid-1920s. To secure financing to stave off insolvency, UFA took part in another act of cooperation that marks the history of the supposed rivalry between Europe and Hollywood, this being the formation of the Parufamet distribution company in conjunction with Paramount and MGM. This company was set up in exchange for a $4 million loan to UFA from the Hollywood companies and gave the latter a way to get around Germany’s quota laws governing imports. The terms of this deal have been detailed elsewhere (e.g., Kreimeier 1996, 127), but suffice it to say that it was very disadvantageous to UFA; Victoria de Grazia has even gone so far as to call it “infamously exploitative” (1989, 68). The pact ultimately meant that the German company sacrificed domestic market share and did not gain any more access to the US market as the US partners gave themselves the option to refuse the German films if they were deemed not to “suit the tastes of American filmgoers” (quoted in Kreimeier 1996, 127). Though UFA had a global reach at this point that was only comparable to the Hollywood studios—with distribution

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offices in Europe, South America, and the Middle East (Elsaesser 2000, 106)—the US market was still the major commercial prize. Attempts to crack this market helped to drive the production spending and this spending and, in a move that mirrored the practices of Hollywood, even extended to unsuccessful attempts to lure Hollywood stars to make films in Germany (Elsaesser 2000, 129). Nevertheless, the line of credit extended to UFA helped to prolong the company’s run of prestige productions which culminated in mega-budget spectaculars such as Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924) and Metropolis (1927), a series of films that Kreimeier describes as “financial miscalculations attributable in large part to management megalomania” (1996, 126). As Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby point out, on average only one of every six of these films accrued international profits (1999, 20). Metropolis was especially disastrous for UFA as it cost over 5 million marks and found little audience interest at home or abroad (despite its eventual legendary status in film history), meaning a total financial write-off for the company. Such a pattern of overspending based on initial success has become a hallmark of European cinema and it will be seen in the case of Studiocanal at several points, and it can also be seen in the activities of European producers such as Goldcrest (which went bankrupt in the 1980s after overspending on films such as The Mission [Roland Joffé, 1986] and others) and Dino De Laurentiis (whose Dune [David Lynch, 1984] was one of his biggest flops of the 1980s presaging his equally unsuccessful run at the helm of DEG later in the decade). The closest heir to Metropolis, however, among European big-budget production would be EuropaCorp’s Valerian, which shared its predecessor’s groundbreaking budget, costing a reported $180 million to make, a sum unheard of for a film made outside of the Hollywood system. Unfortunately, it also shared Metropolis’s critical reception, which was generally poor with some admiration for the inventive visual effects, and suffered a similarly unfortunate commercial run. While the box offices for the Valerian were not as abject as those for Metropolis, the film nonetheless lost a great deal of money. Spending on the film and subsequent losses helped contribute to a period of instability at EuropaCorp that included selling off numerous assets and having to pull back from the company’s international sales and distribution ambitions. The financial fallout from the failure of Metropolis was similarly calamitous at UFA as the company had to be bailed out yet again, this time by publishing magnate (and eventually cabinet minister under the Nazis) Alfred Hugenberg. Hugenberg’s ascent marked the second phase in UFA’s history for our purposes.

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While the eventual impact of Hugenberg’s conservative political convictions on UFA’s output and the company’s eventual annexation to the Nazi party may be the most talked about dimensions of his reign over the company, it is also important to look at some of the other effects of his management of the studio. One of these was the considerable financial discipline instilled by the new chairman and his Chief Manager Ludwig Klitzsch, particularly when it came to production costs (Kreimeier 1996, 162). The duo also renegotiated the Parufamet agreement to UFA’s financial advantage while also giving the company more control over the ideological dimensions of the American films it was importing into the German market (Kreimeier 1996, 163); the pact as a whole was later dissolved in 1932 (Hardt 1996, 119). All told, the new management regime returned the company to profitability by the early 1930s (Elsaesser 2000, 132). Pommer returned to play a key role in production and his approach at this point eschewed the big-budget spectacle films (the “grossefilm” that typified pre-Hugenberg UFA) and instead favored prestige films which tried to balance cultural and commercial appeal (Kreimeier 1996, 189): in short, middlebrow films. The most typical film of this period at UFA was The Blue Angel (Josef Van Sternberg, 1930), a film now famous for the pairing of auteur director Josef Van Sternberg and star Marlene Dietrich but which was at the time envisioned as a vehicle for quality star Emil Jannings and as an adaptation of Henrich Mann’s middlebrow novel. As will be argued later in this book, this film can be seen as a middlebrow archetype that Studiocanal attempted to emulate in its reinvention as a global studio in the late 2000s. To return to the story of UFA, it was in the early 1930s that the newly sustainable UFA fell into the hands of the Nazis who nationalized the company in 1933. This seizure marks the third and final phase in UFA’s story that is of interest here. Under the Nazis, UFA enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the domestic market as foreign films were eventually banned and as German military conquests increased, the studio came to control those markets as well. Production spend rose dramatically as the war progressed and the studio was able to realize spectacular visual effects-driven films like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Josef van Báky, 1943), a film which De Grazia describes as being aimed at a “cross-class, trans-European public” (1989, 81). But with the defeat of the Nazis and subsequent occupation of Germany, UFA’s fortunes suffered greatly. The Allies put in place anti-cartel laws that hamstrung the indigenous German industry and left the marketplace of West Germany open to Hollywood

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domination in a way that, as Kreimeier points out, realized the ambitions harbored by the majors during the 1920s (1996, 384). In East Germany, the government film body DEFA saw UFA as a model to build upon (Kreimeier 1996, 369), but its dominion would, of course, be limited to the Cold War–era Communist world.

Film Europe In the run-up to its nationalization, UFA was the largest film studio in Europe and this contributed to making Germany the strongest film-producing nation in the region. It is thus not surprising that filmmakers based in the country were leaders of attempts to strengthen European markets and production activity. Pommer was once more the focal point as he advocated in the mid-1920s for legal and industrial reforms that would help to convert Europe as a whole into a home market of sorts for European producers to access in the way that Hollywood used America: to make back production costs (Thompson 1984, 111–17). This basic idea underpinned attempts to create reciprocal distribution agreements among producers in different European nations so that films could circulate across borders, looking to create one “Film Europe.” Most of the companies that emerged out of these pacts involved UFA or other German partners, including UFA-Aubert (between France and Germany), Derufa (between Germany and the Soviet Union), and L’Alliance Cinématographique Européene (between Scandanavia, France, and Germany). But there were also others between France and the UK (British International and Pathé; British-Gaumont, etc.) and others that were smaller still (see Thompson 1984, 116–17, for a comprehensive list of these companies). Film Europe also spawned several conferences aimed at panEuropean cooperation and for a brief moment anyway these activities actually resulted in European firms (particularly German ones) gaining market share on the continent at least, if not on the global stage. The movement, which came to the fore in the mid-1920s, fell apart, however, rather quickly by the early 1930s, under the weight of several pressures including the introduction of sound, the economic difficulties that accompanied the Great Depression, and the rising tide of nationalism that portended the Second World War. Synchronous sound brought with it local languages, making attempts to cross borders more difficult to overcome; in short, as one author put it, the change “nationalized the cinema” (Chavanne

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quoted in De Grazia 1989, 70). Industry experiments in dubbing and multilanguage versions ultimately favored the former in most countries, but in the meantime Hollywood stars were becoming the studios’ best assets even if they were dubbed into local languages. Still, European films did circulate across the continent in the early days of sound. As Thompson has shown, Europeans films actually gained market share in the early 1930s in Britain, France, and Germany as quota laws, restrictions on block booking, and other factors helped to limit the growth of American market share (1984, 125). Within these numbers, one sees, however, that local films were the fastest growing segment of that European growth, an issue that would become very pressing after the war when most European markets would become dominated by Hollywood and local films at the expense of imports from other European nations. Most of the formal deals for reciprocal distribution signed during the Film Europe zeitgeist came to an end during the 1930s and the tone and content of German films in particular became explicitly nationalist. Hampered by anti-German sentiment and even an outright boycott from 1936 to 1937 by some national distributors, German exports declined for the rest of the decade until the German army began annexing territories from 1939 onward and thereby created an export market by force (De Grazia 1989, 77–79). Even though Film Europe was short-lived and its demise is a testament perhaps to the larger divisions that fed into the Second World War, what Higson and Maltby pointed out in the 1990s is still true today: its very existence is interesting for understanding the shape of the history of the European film industry including contemporary institutional and artistic practices (1999, 22–25). In its determination to develop reciprocal access to neighboring markets and the intellectual pursuit in the two Film Congresses of themes and narratives which would successfully travel within Europe, the Film Europe experiment anticipated many of the co-production policy experiments of the postwar period. Many of the co-production treaties signed from the 1960s onward were premised upon (sometimes faulty) assumptions that co-production would mean distribution in the same countries that contributed production finance. Similarly, in the debates of the Film Congresses regarding finding stories and themes that resonate in different European markets we can see the same problems that have faced screenwriters and producers working on co-productions of post1960s period. These are also problems that confront confederated European distributors, meaning that Studiocanal itself faces many of the challenges that faced producers in the Film Europe movement.

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The Rank Organization in the 1940s and 1950s The next important company in this discussion was one of the first to be built along what Hjort would call the lines of “affinitive transnationalism” (2010, 19) between Britain and the United States when it came to a shared language and similar ethnic makeup. This axis has had a long-standing impact on global film culture and takes many forms, including stars and filmmakers who have worked between the two countries as well as corporations that have done so in various ways. After all, Britain has been for much of its cinematic history caught between Europe and the United States, between a cultural (arguably) and geographic situation (definitely) that is closer to Europe, but linguistic and historical ties that make the American industry more accessible than it is to its European neighbors. The British-based company in this case is the Rank Organization which did business in Britain, on the European continent, and around the world under a number of different specific names. Over the course of its sixty-year history—running approximately from the mid-1930s until the mid-1990s—the company was active in all parts of the film business, including production, distribution, and exhibition. Launched by flour merchant J. Arthur Rank, the company rose to prominence in the mid-1930s as it bought a sizeable stake in Universal Studios, which was at that moment teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Rank also for a while attempted to partner with UA, only to see his overtures rebuffed by that studio (Balio 1987b, 19). In both gambits, Rank’s basic idea was to offer up the use of his global distribution and exhibition holdings which had been built up in the 1930s—which included distribution in many parts of Europe, as well as exhibition and distribution in Canada, Australia, South Africa, and South America (Macnab 1993, 80–81)—as the foreign distribution operations of the two studios in exchange for reciprocal access for his productions to the US market. Rank’s global empire would thus distribute his own British works as well as American films. In practice, however, the reciprocal access to the US market proved not to be as straightforward as Rank had hoped. Universal did not have the distribution capacity to handle all of Rank’s productions and so Rank started another US distribution company with financing from railroad magnate Robert Young, with the new company being dubbed Eagle-Lion and with the understanding that it would have its own slate of American productions as well as whatever Rank films Universal did not want to distribute itself; Rank would then handle the distribution of Eagle-Lion’s films outside of the United States (Balio 1987b, 21).

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At its peak, the Rank Organization had production deals with four of the most important producer/directors in British film history: Laurence Olivier, David Lean, Michael Powell, and Emeric Pressburger, as well as a host of others. Under Rank’s aegis, these filmmakers made some of what are to this day considered to be the great masterpieces of British film history, including Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) which was the first British film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948), Black Narcissus (1947), and others. Some of these were successful in the US market (particularly Hamlet and The Red Shoes as well as the film Cesar and Cleopatra [Gabriel Pascal, 1945] [Street 2002, 105]), but the vast majority of Rank’s films were not. During the immediate postwar period, the Rank Organization was particularly hurt by the Dalton Duty Act, a law enacted by the British government to curb US dollar outflows by putting a 75 percent tax on imported films. This led the Motion Pictures Export Association to initiate a boycott of the UK market which in turn impacted Rank in a number of ways, two of which are particularly important here. First, Rank drastically increased its production output in 1947, vowing to make forty-three features as well as animated films and newsreels and committing over £9 million to do so (Macnab 1993, 182). This investment may have been welcomed by producers and the government, but it did not result in saleable films as the haste at which they were assembled meant quality controls were lowered. The end result was an expensive mass of films that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic mainly rejected. Compounding the problem was that Rank’s exhibitors had to take on much of this product as well as the American films needed to draw audiences, leaving little room for Eagle-Lion’s pictures (Balio 1987b, 33). In the end, Rank was facing losses on all aspects of his business and began the process of downsizing his production output, cutting over 1,800 jobs in the conglomerate and drastically reducing the number of films made (Balio 2010, 71). Eagle-Lion for its part went bankrupt in 1951, leaving Rank without a direct distribution outlet in the US market, though it retained much of its global distribution infrastructure. This downsizing would be the beginning of a larger shift within the Rank Organization away from production. Prestige pictures, made by the likes of Lean and Powell and Pressburger, were no longer on the agenda and the conglomerate began to rely instead on low-to medium-budget films made by its Ealing Studios subsidiary (run by famed British producer Michael Balcon), films which included a number of films now recognized as veritable classics of British cinema, including The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951), Kind

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Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949), and others. These films were for a brief time popular in export markets, including the United States, but once their appeal waned in that market, Rank sold off the studio (Trumpbour 2007, 205). To keep its distribution pipeline filled from the 1950s onward, the company relied mainly on acquisitions from independents and Hollywood studios (with whom it occasionally coproduced films). As a European distributor, the company remained successful into the late 1960s when it was still outperforming some of the US majors in important markets such as West Germany (Bergfelder 2005a, 71). By that time, however, Rank was hardly producing at all, much to the chagrin of those working in the British film industry. Ironically, this withdrawal from production was caused as much by success in one area of the conglomerate as it was by failure in the production realm in the past. The company invested in Xerox in the mid-1950s and was well positioned to profit from the growth of that company. Rank’s lieutenant John Davis subsequently decided that the company no longer needed to risk returns in the speculative film production business and instead diversified into a range of leisure industries while only producing a range of popular genre films such as the Carry On films or star vehicles for comedian Norman Wisdom (Macnab 1993, 221–30). Rank’s business model in the latter period of its existence as a distributor and exhibitor exclusively has some historical resonance as well as contemporary relevance. Like Charles Pathé before him, Rank opted out of vertical integration, though the state of the independent production marketplace at least afforded his company a profitable future, unlike Pathé’s US operations. The company’s reliance on acquisitions also anticipates the contemporary business plans of Pathé, which only makes a handful of features annually, and to an even greater extent Entertainment One, which as previously discussed is almost exclusively a film distributor rather than a film producer. The contemporary relevance of Rank does not end with its later business model. The production philosophy it undertook in the 1940s that favored middlebrow prestige pictures is very much alive and well in contemporary European cinema. Some seventy years later, this sector is still plagued with the feast-or-famine problems that Rank encountered when he found great success with historical and literary dramas such as Hamlet and Cesar and Cleopatra but abject commercial failure with the rest of his US slate (Balio 1987b, 34). Such extremes of fortune are still true of middlebrow fare on the international market, as will be seen in the discussion of Studiocanal’s middlebrow output in Chapter 6. We can also perhaps see some resonances of the success of the modestly budgeted Ealing features in the romantic comedies

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produced by Working Title for PolyGram and others from the mid-1990s onward. As we will see this has also been a form of cinema that Studiocanal has been involved with in various ways.

Distributing through Hollywood I: American distributors and European producers, 1946–80 From the declining fortunes of indigenous organizations, we can now turn to the important role that US distributors have played in fostering European production, a role which will anticipate later developments in the late 1980s and the 1990s. The breakthrough success of Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1946) and other European films in the American market, combined with declining studio output after the Paramount decision broke up the studio system to show American distributors and exhibitors that European product could be commercially viable. This realization would ultimately have a profound effect on film history, helping to develop the careers of innumerable European auteur directors and make global icons out of stars such as Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon, and others. It also branded European cinema as art cinema and the cinema of the auteur, brands that have ossified in many ways into crude stereotypes that still affect audiences, critics, filmmakers, and even policy-makers. From an industrial point of view this growing popularity also fostered an unprecedented intertwining of the US and European film industries as key European producers began to form partnerships with US distribution companies for access not only to the US market, but in some cases global markets as well. One of the most important companies in this trend was United Artists, as Balio has detailed (1987b, 222–301). Under the aegis of managers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, UA forged alliances with British talents such as Woodfall Films (producers of many films of the so-called British New Wave as well as Tom Jones [Tony Richardson, 1963] and later films for UA), the Beatles (financing their films A Hard Day’s Night [Richard Lester, 1964] and Help! [Richard Lester, 1965]), and producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli who brought the James Bond series to the studio. The studio also enjoyed a long-running, profitable partnership with Italian producer Alberto Grimaldi who oversaw the production of numerous “Spaghetti Westerns” which featured American stars and the most famous of which were directed by Sergio Leone. Grimaldi also produced more normative art cinema for UA through partnerships with

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Federico Fellini and Bernardo Bertolucci, with the latter’s 1973 hit Last Tango in Paris being one of the most controversial films of the decade and a massive commercial success for the studio. UA also financed and distributed films from French auteurs Claude Lelouch and Franҫois Truffaut, among others. Other majors would also become involved in European cinema, including Columbia whose involvement predated UA’s, with its acquisition of Kingsley International in 1956 (Balio 2010, 84). It was Kingsley International/Columbia which helped to introduce foreign language films into the mainstream in the United States through its very successful release of And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1957), making Brigitte Bardot into a global icon in the process. Also featuring prominently in the industrial landscape of the time were independents such as Harrison Pictures, Janus Films, and Continental Distributors all of which were key players in building markets for arthouse releases and sometimes invested directly in the production of the films (Balio 2010, 85). One of the most influential of these independents was Embassy Pictures, the distribution and later production company founded by Joseph Levine. Levine turned the company from a small niche distributor in the New England area of the United States into an international power by importing Italian peplum films—so-called “sword and sandal” period action films—and retitling them and dubbing them for the American market. With this practice he had an enormous commercial hit with Hercules (Pietro Francisi, 1958) and went on to release several others in this genre. In 1960, Levine moved into arthouse releases when he acquired Vittorio de Sica’s Two Women and made it into one of the biggest foreign language releases of all-time in the United States up to that point. Embassy would later release Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and forge a production partnership with Italian producer Carlo Ponti that would underpin the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), Vittorio de Sica’s Marriage Italian Style (1961), the auteur-driven portmanteau film Boccaccio 70 (1962) and other recognized arthouse classics. At the same time, Levine continued to release exploitation fare, European and otherwise, using nearly identical promotional strategies for the two types of films (McKenna 2016, 75–76). As such, Levine was part of the producing team behind one of the most famous depictions of American involvement in the European film industry in the 1960s, the aforementioned Contempt, and was himself personally the primary target of the film’s satire. The film’s caricature of Levine as the coarse, imbecilic philistine Prokosh (Jack Palance) is a vivid reminder of the cultural tensions that were inherent in the American involvement in the European film industry

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of this period. Levine (as well as Ponti) famously insisted on more nude shots of the film’s star Brigitte Bardot, provoking Godard to include the film’s now equally famous opening sequence which may have included Bardot’s buttocks but did so in ways that undermined sexual spectacle. Despite Godard’s evident resentment aimed at the producer, Levine biographer A. T. McKenna, among others, has pointed out that the film would have been much worse off artistically if not for this scene (2016, 96), meaning that we have in Contempt an instance where American involvement, albeit ironically, helped to create the conditions necessary for a distinctively European film to be made. In artistic terms at least, Contempt was not the only example of American and European elements coming together in interesting ways during the period. This melding of American capital and European talent helped to create what Peter Lev has called the Euro-American cinema (1993), one which at an aesthetic level blended the auteur sensibility of European art cinema with the production values, star casting practices and the use of the English language that typifies American commercial cinema. For Lev, the most typical films resulting from this intersection include his case studies Blow Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966; financed and distributed by MGM) and Last Tango in Paris, as well as later films from the 1980s such as Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) and The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987). This artistic and commercial model bears a close resemblance to one variation on the middlebrow formulas that characterize much of Studiocanal’s output in the contemporary period, one which also deploys the artistic abilities of and cultural capital associated with auteur directors. In addition to this particular hybrid, the prominence of the art film emerging from this period is of course obvious, but we should not overlook the significant number of successful popular genre and exploitation films that also emerged. Besides the pepla produced by the likes of Levine, Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, and others, there were a number of spy films aimed at emulating the success of the Bond films (Bergfelder 2005a, 67) as well as the Westerns that remain famous to this day. As we will see, popular and exploitation genres will come to feature more and more in the output of European companies as this story goes on.

Coproduction and pan-European cinema Running parallel to, and sometimes overlapping with the growing dependency of European cinema on American capital and distribution in the 1950s and

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1960s were efforts by some European countries to foster outward-looking film production by means of international co-production. These efforts included the signing of numerous bilateral and multilateral co-production treaties that helped to offer producers mutual access to national subsidies in partnering nations as well as a range of other financial incentives. Such programs and policies remain in place to the present day and this section of the chapter will thus range widely over the postwar period. The first major treaty that existed between European nations was signed by France and Italy in 1949 and this has since become one of the most prolific formal treaties, having produced over 1,500 films between the time of its inception and its absorption into the wider EU co-production treaty (Jackel 1996, 87). Since this pact was signed, treaties proliferated across the continent and many of these were eventually superseded by the European Convention on Cinematographic Co-Production which came into effect in 1992 and accompanied the legal integration of the European economies under the auspices of the EU. Before and after the creation of this omnibus co-production treaty, legal co-productions (i.e., those made under treaties) became increasingly complex in legal and financial terms as more and more conditions were attached to the awards. These complexities in various contexts often involved points systems based on creative elements of the individual projects and other bureaucratic measures to ensure compliance with the spirits of the various treaties. Additionally, Eurimages was set up by the Council of Europe to provide financial support for European co-productions in 1988 and the MEDIA program was launched at around the same time initially with a similar mandate. These pan-European funds have been complemented by regional, national, and intranational subsidy funds as well as tax incentive programs and other forms of aid. Producers in Europe now routinely devote years in many cases to assembling a patchwork of funds from these sources to arrive at an acceptable budget to complete their films. Innumerable films have been made under the auspices of all these treaties, programs, and incentive regimes. As Bergfelder points out, while many popular films made under such conditions have been derisively labeled “Europuddings,” this system has also supported many auteur filmmakers across the continent (2000, 144). It is thus difficult to generalize about the outcomes of such policies and critics and historians who have tried to do so have rendered verdicts ranging from the very optimistic, such as Mike Wayne’s hope that programs like Eurimages could create a “European cinema that could act as the conscience of a continent” (2002, 140); to the very pessimistic, such as

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Elsaesser’s view of European cinema as “artificially kept alive” in part by such programs and “speaking to no constituency” beyond students and cinephiles, even if this is in his view an ironically positive development on the whole as it bestows greater creative autonomy on the continent’s auteur directors (2015, 19). As much as they may have in some cases severed the connection between audiences and filmmakers and in all cases created films that would not have otherwise existed, these programs have done little to change the fundamental balance of power in the global film industries. The MEDIA fund would later be revamped to focus on providing distribution incentives to European films being exported within the EU and this strategic shift was telling of a bigger problem with much European co-production. As Puttnam pointed out in the 1990s, incentive programs were at that point solely oriented toward getting films made, without any consideration for getting them seen (1997, 326). Data compiled by Huw Jones suggests that such co-productions do at least travel more widely than their local (i.e., financed from sources in a single nation) counterparts (2016), and perhaps policy alterations made in the intervening twenty years—including the aforementioned changes to the MEDIA program and similar modifications to individual national incentive programs—can be credited for this. Whatever the specific cause, transnational circulation is a vital aspect of co-production. After all, its very existence as a policy instrument and an economic practice is predicated on the pooling of resources across national borders. These resources include production finance (the first and most pressing need for producers), but ultimately there was/is also the hope for recoupment in multiple markets as few European films outside of the most wildly successful hits can hope to recoup in their home markets alone. As the Hollywood majors have continued to dominate international distribution throughout the postwar period, it is not surprising that producers involved in co-productions have often sought out American distribution partners, leading to situations such as the making of Contempt or the ongoing vital importance of companies such as Sony Pictures Classics to the European production sector (Tzouimakis 2012, 109-132). The creative problems faced by Godard and other European filmmakers are one source of concern given such industrial dynamics but another, perhaps more pressing, issue is the loss of any profits that are generated by European cinema to the Hollywood power structure. Such fears are exacerbated by Hollywood’s aforementioned growing presence in local film production on the continent as national divisions of the

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majors routinely handle the national distribution of local hit films in Germany, France, and Spain, among other markets. The picture is not all gloomy, however, as some European films have been able to achieve local success and global circulation without going wholly through the Hollywood majors. As was discussed in the introduction, some of the biggest global European films in recent years have been coproduced by sales agents which in some cases double as distributors in national territories, including Les Intouchables (Gaumont) and Serial (Bad) Weddings (TF1). Moreover, many of the most established auteurs whose films are regularly made via co-production have ongoing relationships with sales agents and independent distributors, including Michael Haneke who works regularly with Les Films du Losange, Pedro Almodóvar who has in recent years been working with FilmNation and Ken Loach whose most recent works have been coproduced with Wild Bunch and a group of international distributors. The inclusion of Wild Bunch in this discussion is a testament to the extent to which the current crop of confederated distribution and sales companies are a logical continuation and outgrowth of the European co-production industry. Companies such as Studiocanal or Pathé are in some ways just larger versions of Gaumont, boasting a presence in multiple markets instead of just one and still facing the pressure felt by producers in distribution-led co-productions to make films that appeal to disparate nations simultaneously. With this augmented “home” market comes the ability to finance films with greater and greater budgets, as that combined market holds the potential to amortize greater sums. For this reason, we can ask similar questions of a Pathé or Studiocanal film that we can of any other co-production. Regardless of their legal credits and nationalities, these are films with multiple constituencies written into their business models.

Distributing through Hollywood II: European films in the US Indie boom of the 1980s and 1990s Besides the burgeoning co-production industry in Europe, European producers had other options for pursuing global ambitions in the 1980s and 1990s. One of these went deeper than working with the Hollywood studios and consisted instead of working directly for a studio as an employee or in some cases forming one’s own American-based studio. Hollywood has long attracted European filmmakers in all roles, including producers such as Erich Pommer.

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Dino De Laurentiis added to this particular tradition when he left the Italian film industry, where he had begun his career with neorealist films in the 1950s and ended it with coproduced historical epics in the 1960s, to go to Hollywood to work as a freelance producer.2 Here he set up projects at various studios throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including Serpico (Sydney Lumet, 1973), Death Wish (Michael Winner, 1974), and the ill-fated sci-fi epic Dune (David Lynch, 1983). This experience producing in the studio system was the prelude to De Laurentiis launching DEG (the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group) in 1984. This was an integrated production and distribution company serving the American market. In forming the company, De Laurentiis was hoping to cash in the boom in film sales caused by the mass popularization of cable television and home video. To do so, he acquired AVCO Embassy (Joseph Levine’s old company) and set about producing an ambitious slate of original productions. The company, however, was short-lived and filed for bankruptcy in 1989, having not achieved a single significant commercial hit (Wyatt 2000, 153), despite producing at least one arthouse classic in the form of Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1987) and one enduringly popular comedy (popularity which became apparent only after DEG’s bankruptcy) in the form of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Steven Herek, 1989). DEG was not the only foreign-owned company during the period looking to profit from the home video boom in America. Israeli cousins Menaheim Golan and Yoram Globus acquired the Cannon Group during the decade and turned it into a remarkably prolific creator of shlocky genre films, including a number of sequels to Death Wish. In addition to their production activities, Cannon also acquired exhibition assets in a number of European markets, including the UK as well as the Thorn-EMI film catalog of British films. Cannon, like DEG, faltered financially in the late 1980s, sold off some of its assets and was acquired by MGM which was at the time owned and managed by the rogue Italian financier Giancarlo Parretti. Another would-be European studio in Hollywood began when Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna, former film sales executives from Lebanon and Hungary respectively, teamed to acquire Carolco Pictures and began producing films such as the Rambo series and, later in the 1990s popular hits like Terminator 2 (James Cameron, 1991) and Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoven, 1992). Helping to finance the films made by Carolco was a consortium of equity investors from abroad including Pioneer from Japan, Rizzoli from Italy, Credit Lyonnais from France and Le Studio Canal Plus as it was known then. LSC’s involvement in the

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company means that Carolco will be discussed at length later in Chapter 2. For now, it can at least be said that Carolco, like DEG and Cannon, also encountered financial problems and faced bankruptcy in 1996. What was gained for European cinema from this run of partly European firms in Hollywood? Not much in total. Not only were these companies unstable and largely producers of low-grade films in aesthetic and cultural terms, but they had little connection to European cinema. The vast majority of the films produced were American-set and involved creative talents from the United States. There were exceptions, such as the Finnish director Renny Harlin and Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger and the handful of European art films that emerged from these companies, most notably Godard’s King Lear (1987), which was financed by the Cannon Group, but by-and-large these companies were intent on making American films in the Hollywood genre mode. This is not to say they had no effect whatsoever on European cinema. Their involvement in the institutions of European cinema had a great deal of impact, though most of it was negative and nearly catastrophic. Cannon’s purchase of the Thorn-EMI assets, including Elstree Studios and nearly 300 cinemas across the UK is held by some to one of the most disastrous events in British cinema’s tumultuous history in the 1980s (e.g., Walker 2004). Paretti’s financial dealings not only nearly destroyed the venerable Hollywood studio MGM, but also pushed Credit Lyonnais—one of the most important lenders to European filmmakers at the time—to the brink of bankruptcy (McClintick 1996). Carolco for its part inflicted large losses on its European partners, as will be seen in the next chapter. These sometimes calamitous errors notwithstanding, the group of companies also had some positive impacts on the development of future European corporate activity by virtue of their influential deployment of foreign presales to finance large-budget films. This practice helped Cannon and Carolco in particular to get their films made and this had a knock-on effect on genre and aesthetics as the practice of preselling invariably became easier when high-concept, star-driven packages were presented to buyers, hence the swathe of Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, and Sylvester Stallone films emerging from the two companies. It is not all that difficult to see films such as Taken and other contemporary Liam Neeson action films, for example, as growing out of similar market conditions. These companies changed the market dynamics in fundamental ways and the 1980s as a whole would see the independent film sales market grow dramatically, growth that continues up to the present day.

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Selling through “Indiewood” in the 1980s and 1990s With some of its leading producers tied up in ultimately doomed Hollywood ventures, European cinema continued producing and coproducing films on the continent and subsequently struggling to get them into the global distribution machinery or into the coveted American market. The interest in European art cinema that drove the developments in the postwar period had largely died out by the time of the release of Last Tango in Paris in 1973, which Balio argues was the last European arthouse film to make it into mainstream American culture in the postwar aftermath of the success of Rome, Open City (2010, 296–99). More sophisticated audience tastes were now being catered for by the new American cinema which saw artistically and thematically challenging films made by auteur directors emerge from the studio system. (Ironically, many of these filmmakers whose works replaced European auteur films on American screens were themselves heavily influenced by those same European auteur films.) Be that as it may, American audiences were receiving the kind of adult-fare they had lacked under the Production Code and were getting it in English with their favorite stars to boot. UA and Columbia subsequently closed down their arthouse divisions and many specialty distributors went out of business. The same home video boom that brought so many independents into the American market would ultimately lay the foundations for a new infrastructure for distributing European films in the world’s biggest market. Independent distributors emerged during this period which would prove to be more successful and durable than their European counterparts. Like successful arthouse distributors from the 1960s like Lopert and Kingsley International, these firms ended up in one way or another working with the majors and the majors themselves likewise opened their own specialty divisions to tap this emerging, often very profitable market. The most high-profile and successful company of the period was Miramax, but others included New Line, Orion, Focus Features, Fox Searchlight, and Sony Pictures Classics. The primary segment of the global industry that these companies impacted was that of American independent cinema, and they have been generally credited with having created a golden age of sorts for American auteur directors looking to work outside of the normative studio set up. But they also had a very big influence on European cinema and its production and global circulation. Perren has shown how important European films such as Il Postino (Michael Radford and Massimo Troisi, 1994), Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988), The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1993),

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and Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997) were to the commercial fortunes of Miramax (2012). The Crying Game was, according to her account, perhaps the single most important acquisition the company made as its commercial success (thanks to a now legendary marketing campaign on Miramax’s behalf) paved the way for the company’s acquisition by Disney in 1994 (2012, 58). Other companies also realized highly profitable returns from their European films, including Fox Searchlight’s major hit with The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997), New Line/Fine Line’s Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000), and Sony Pictures Classics with Howards End (James Ivory, 1992). Such studios also formed ongoing partnerships with European producers, such as Fine Line’s deals with Lars von Trier’s company Zentropa and others (Tzioumakis 2012, 100) or SPC’s long-standing relationship with Pedro Almodóvar, to cite just two examples. While European films were thus attracting a great deal of attention during this period, there were some problems that were also arising. As is evident from the list of hits described above, the vast majority of the most successful films exported during this period were made in the English language, despite the occasional breakout hit in the form of Life is Beautiful or Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2000). This invariably meant that the new distributors would focus mostly on British producers and films as they chased the next crossover hit. As Paul McDonald has shown, there were also implicit creative pressures in the form of particularly Miramax’s tendency to favor films with a “cozy” and “touristic” view of Europe, cut off from history and politics (2009, 370). At times these creative pressures could become very explicit and aggressive, most famously when Miramax chairman Harvey Weinstein was involved with a film. Weinstein earned the sobriquet “Harvey Scissorhands” for his willingness to edit films he acquired or produced against the wishes of the filmmakers and he had several high-profile conflicts during this period with directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci whose film Little Buddha (1994) was released by the company in a limited fashion, allegedly because the director would not agree to the cuts suggested by Miramax (Biskind 2004, 231–34). Miramax is also a case in point for another problem that arose for European filmmakers during this blossoming of specialty distribution in the 1990s. When The Crying Game became a surprise hit in the US market grossing nearly $63 million there in total, the film’s British financiers British Screen and Channel 4 were unable to recoup any of the profits besides the small acquisition fee Miramax originally paid for the film ($2.5 million according to Walker

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[2004, 151]); instead, the rest of the profits stayed with the American company. With the film originally mired in the financial mess created by the collapse of production company Palace Pictures, Miramax had negotiated a highly favorable deal for the distributor at the expense of the producers (Biskind 2004, 187–88). Such predatory deal-making and other forms of financial chicanery were yet further unsavory hallmarks of Miramax and many European producers found themselves on the receiving end of it,3 but whatever the specific company was, this was yet another reminder of the exploitative relationship that has existed between Hollywood and European companies, further speaking to the need for a bigger and stronger European producer and distributor. In the 1990s such an aspiration seemed was a possibility as the most highly developed European studio since Rank for a while existed in the form of the final company to be discussed in this chapter.

Building a studio from the ground up: PolyGram Filmed Entertainment as precursor to Studiocanal Though the 1990s is thought of as one of the most important decades in the history of American independent cinema, one of the most important companies of the period was an integrated European studio, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment (henceforth PFE). After an abortive attempt to enter the film business in the early 1980s, PFE was launched in 1991 with the goal of producing films for the international market. Acquiring production companies such as Working Title, Propaganda Films, and later others such as Island Pictures and Interscope, PFE set about financing and distributing approximately eight to fifteen films per year. In approximately seven years of full operation (1991–98), the company financed and produced some of the most artistically influential and commercially successful films of the 1990s. A short list of their critical hits would include titles such as Fargo (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996), Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, 1998), Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999), and The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995) as well as box office hits such as Bean (Mel Smith, 1997) and Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994), the latter of which became the archetype of the transatlantic romantic comedy subgenre (Honess Roe 2009). At the end of this heady eight-year run, however, the company had yet to turn a profit and parent company Philips became impatient with PolyGram Music (in which PFE was embedded)—which was experiencing

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a downturn that would later engulf the whole recording industry—and decided to sell it to beverage manufacturer Seagram’s. After PFE’s losses made it unpalatable to potential buyers, Seagram’s shut down the subsidiary and sold off much of its library to MGM, ending yet another attempt at European studiobuilding. Despite its successful track record during the period and the general methodological preference for industry studies among scholars of the decade, PFE has gone without extensive discussion within the field. Aside from brief discussions by Wayne (2002, 42–44), Perren (2012, 107–09), and an article detailing its relationship with producers Working Title specifically (Townsend 2017), the most thoroughgoing examination of the company is found in the form of the memoirs of former CEO Michael Kuhn (2002). This section of the chapter will hope to fill this gap in the historiography of the 1990s as well as a similar gap in the history of European studios. In so doing, it seeks to explore more fully the factors that led to the company posting losses throughout the period and will also argue that the problems encountered by PFE can in turn illuminate some of the strategic decisions that Studiocanal would later take, helping it to avoid the mistakes and a similar fate to what I contend is its most similar predecessor in terms of ambition and of course, given its proximity in time, the historical market conditions encountered by both companies. We should begin first by looking at the corporate context for PFE, which is both similar and dissimilar to that of Studiocanal. Film and television studios have over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries become subordinate and relatively small segments of larger corporations. Conglomeration of this kind has been most pronounced in the United States, where waves of different companies, ranging from soft drinks manufacturers to oil and gas suppliers have at one point or another acquired Hollywood studios. At present, all the Hollywood majors are parts of larger media conglomerates and are thus at the mercy of such parent companies (for an overview of these developments, see Balio 2013, 7–24 or Schatz 2008). PFE and Studiocanal are instances of similar corporate structures and understanding their strategies, output and ultimately their fates as going concerns necessarily means accounting for the impact of those structures. PFE, as has been discussed, was a division of a record company embedded within a hardware manufacturer (Philips). PolyGram records was founded by Philips and German manufacturer Siemens in the 1950s, anticipating corporate developments in the rest of the media world by decades. By the 1980s, this organizational blend of hardware and software would become commonplace.

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General Electric acquired radio and television company RCA/NBC in the mid1980s. Japanese manufacturer Sony followed suit in the late 1980s by acquiring Columbia/TriStar Pictures. Another Japanese firm, Matsushita—maker of Panasonic branded products among other things—sought the same kind of diversification when it acquired MCA, then parent company of Universal Studios and an owner of the MCA record label. The strategic goal for all these companies was to find “synergies” between hardware and software. PolyGram for its part became instrumental to Philips (who bought out Siemens from the joint venture in the 1980s) and helped to keep the company as a whole profitable when hardware manufacturing struggled (Dawtrey and Carver 1998). The film division was launched in the early 1990s to diversify the record label and, again, in pursuit of “synergies,” this time between two forms of software: music and film. The ultimate demise of PFE can be directly traced to its subordinate position within the hierarchy of the conglomerate. The fateful decision to sell PolyGram as a whole to Seagram’s—a soft drinks manufacturer that had already acquired Universal Studios and Records from Matsushita—came directly from the management of Philips. When Jan Timmer retired as CEO of the conglomerate in 1997, his replacement Cor Boonstra simply didn’t want the company to be in the software business any longer. This decision was informed by larger trends— as mentioned, music was in decline as a business, hampered by the nascent boom in online music piracy—and therefore should not be seen as solely a whim of a capricious new chairman, but it at no point involved the management of PFE or PolyGram. From the proverbial frying pan into the fire, PFE was next at the mercy of Seagram’s CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. who had no interest in the new film company and began trying to sell it off even before the acquisition of PolyGram was completed (Peers and Carver 1998). Seagram’s failure to find a taker for the company, along with overlap with Universal Studios’ operations, led to its closure. Throughout this convoluted process, PFE at no point controlled its own destiny, nor did it seem at any time that the company’s track record of hits and artistic landmarks mattered a whit to its various overlords. Despite this track record, the company lost money, hundreds of millions of dollars in fact according to regulatory filings. Though Kuhn described this as an anticipated part of the capital-intensive process of building a studio from scratch and promised that profitability was just around the corner, his promises ultimately were not enough to convince Boonstra, Bronfman, or the market at large. The company instead met with what Kuhn would later bitterly refer to as “death by owner” (2002, 143).

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As we will see in Chapter 3 especially but also Chapter 4, Studiocanal is likewise a relatively small part of a much larger corporation and this has caused it some difficulties at times when Canal Plus and Vivendi chairmen have made decisions that adversely affected the studio. A key difference, however, is that Studiocanal is part of a software conglomerate— one that primarily sells television services and music—rather than a hardware company. In such a context, a maker of film and television content makes more sense than in the context of consumer goods manufacturer, but perhaps there is still reason to raise an eyebrow at the current Vivendi management’s determination that Studiocanal, like PFE before it, finds ways to achieve “synergies” between screen production and its music division Universal Music Group. Leaving aside these questions of larger corporate context for now, we can return to the losses that PFE produced for its parent companies. Why did the company lose so much money if it also produced so many hit films? The answer to this question brings us back to the considerable barriers to entry that exist when attempting to become a global studio in the mold of a Hollywood major. Besides their investments in production, which were considerable as the company went from making small to middle-budget films to more expensive works as the 1990s progressed, PFE spent vast sums of money developing two aspects of the company thought to be vital to competing on a global level: its library and its distribution network. Libraries—which Eric Hoyt describes as “films and television programs [that studios] own that have gone through the first cycle of distribution,” often with all or at least the bulk of their costs recouped (2014, 2)—are the bedrock of many distribution companies’ business plans. This gives them a competitive advantage over new entrants to the industry as the old titles continue to generate cash flow that is largely profit as new productions add to that catalog and thus increase the amount of cash flow. As Puttnam points out, not having back catalogs of the size and quality of Hollywood studios has put European studios at a serious competitive disadvantage, as the continent has seen only a few “large, well-capitalized companies capable of producing, marketing and retaining ownership of a consistent stream of films over a number of years” (1997, 184). PFE hoped to become such a consistent producer of films and television programs, but it began its life as a film distributor without any library and therefore having to play “catch up” when it came to building this aspect of the business. The company would go on to make two major acquisitions in this vein. The first of these came in 1995 when it purchased the back catalog of

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the ITC company, a library that consisted mainly of television programming, though it also included 350 films. With this acquisition, PFE set its sights on entering the television market. PFE would spend the next two years looking for a large film catalog, trying twice (and failing) to acquire MGM for this purpose as well as making unsuccessful bids for the libraries of the Samuel Goldwyn Company and East Asian distributor Golden Harvest (Kuhn 2002, 137). The company was finally able to acquire a major film library in 1997 when it bought the catalog of Epic Films for a reported $225 million, outbidding a number of Hollywood studios in the process (Peers and Weiner 1998). This purchase effectively tripled PFE’s back catalog from 500 to 1500 titles. The importance of this acquisition to PFE was evidenced by the price it was willing to pay, which was reported to be a $100 million greater than the lowest bidder in the auction (Peers and Weiner 1998). But, however happy Kuhn may have been to finally get a large film catalog, it came too late to make much of a difference to PFE. Only six months later the company as a whole was put up for sale by Seagram’s. In addition to these large investments in back catalogs, PFE also spent copiously on international distribution infrastructure. For Kuhn, the single most important plank of a film studio’s strategy had to be controlling the distribution of the studio’s films. This contrasted with companies that simply financed production and depended on distributors to pay them a portion of the income that the films generate. Invariably, it would be more efficient, the reasoning went, to cut out the “middle men” and to distribute the films directly, thereby breaking from the historical tendencies of European producers after the Second World War. In so doing, PFE initially prioritized two markets: those of the UK (where they at first distributed using the Rank Organization’s infrastructure before developing their own) and the United States, the two biggest national markets in the world at the time for film and television. In the United States, PFE set up Gramercy Pictures, a co-venture with Universal. This was a significant gamble as marketing films in the United States was/is costly and competitive, due to the geographic size of the country and the sheer number of films on the market, many of which, of course, are backed by the deep-pocketed Hollywood studios. Through Gramercy, PFE released its smaller-budgeted films and then sold/licensed the rights for its higher-budgeted films to third-parties, until 1997 when it established a bigger division in the United States at further expense. All told, Wayne pegs the total expenditure laid out by PFE to enter the American distribution market alone at $1 billion (2002, 7). But PFE did not stop there.

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Over the course of the 1990s the company acquired distributors in a further twelve countries and in 1996 bought Universal out of its share of Gramercy. All told, in eight years, the company had acquired or set up fifteen distribution subsidiaries. In his memoirs, Kuhn speaks with pride of this achievement,4 but he spends much less time discussing how costly this surely was and how difficult it would have been to organize and coordinate this large network that was put together with such haste. The pursuit of a library and a global distribution network thus cost PFE great sums of money and this was a large part of why the company showed no profits throughout its existence. It is impossible to know, of course, if these investments would have paid off in the long run for PFE, but they did not give the company’s parent companies the profits they were looking for in the short term and the studio was disbanded as a result. Studiocanal in its current formation likewise faced the barrier presented by distribution, but was fortunate enough to have a sizeable library in place when it started its expansion in 2006. As such, the assembly of this library and its exploitation during the current period will be addressed in due course when chronicling the company’s rise to its current position. The distribution network on the other hand had to be built and it is very historically significant that the company is able to produce as much as it does with such a relatively small network compared to a firm like PFE. Studiocanal distributes directly in five markets compared to PFE’s fifteen. Crucially, no effort was made during this time or since to set up direct distribution in the US market, which is still of course the most lucrative one in the world. Instead, Studiocanal has continued to sell its wares to third-party distributors in that market. Though this strategy has not always produced box office returns that mirrored the films’ performance in international markets, the company’s executives have pointed out that it has kept Studiocanal from incurring major losses on marketing costs in the United States (Darmon 2015a). How is this possible when Kuhn thought it so important only fifteen years previously? The answer to this question lies in changes in the macroeconomic environment for film and television, the most fundamental of which has been what I have elsewhere described as the “inversion” of the international markets for film and television (Meir 2016a, 54). This phenomenon has seen the US market come to represent a smaller and smaller proportion of the global market for screen media since the 1990s. While there have been numerous statistical documentations of this trajectory, Dwayne Winseck (2011) provides the most telling analysis for our concerns here. His analysis charts the changes from 1998—the last full year

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that PFE existed—to 2010, four years into Studiocanal’s push into international production and distribution. During this time, the industries themselves grew considerably, by some 76 percent. But the international side of that growth far outstripped the growth in the United States and Canada, the two countries that the film industry considers to be the “domestic market.” In 1998, the United States and Canada made up and approximately 54 percent of the global film market ($24.9 billion out of a global total of $46.45 billion). Given such a macroeconomic environment, one could understand why Kuhn felt the US market was such a priority. In 2010, by contrast, the United States and Canada accounted for only 44 percent of the world film market ($38.4 billion out of 87.4 billion) and the United States made up 40 percent of the overall market for film and television ($175.3 billion out of $483.7 billion). Again, the larger industrial change can be seen as in part explaining why Studiocanal would put less emphasis on the North American market. It is also important to note that these trends have continued to accelerate with the United States and Canada coming to represent 36.6 percent of the world market for films in 2014, with the United States itself accounting for “only” 33 percent of the global total (British Film Institute 2015, 6). Going hand in hand with this market inversion has been the growth of the film sales industry, which was seen in the previous section of this chapter. In his memoirs, Kuhn memorably recounts how primitive the international sales and home video markets were in the early 1980s, with sales agents sitting at desks with photo albums full of posters and haggling over prices taking only a few minutes (19). While this may be something of an exaggeration, the industry was to grow dramatically in size and sophistication during the decade that followed and by the end of 1990s was a vital source of financing and recoupment for independent producers. For PFE, growing in this decade alongside the sales market, this meant an increasing number of foreign partners, but not yet enough to rely on for large parts of the budgets. Due largely to the aggressive bidding from companies like Miramax, competition in the sales markets for acquisitions during this period was intense which, as Tzioumakis has shown, forced specialty distributors to shoulder more risk and invest in production (2012, 117). PFE was in precisely this predicament and had to rely on a mix that heavily favored risk, with 75 percent of their distribution slate consisting of original productions (Kuhn 2002, 85). The sales market would grow considerably after the closure of the company to the point that Studiocanal, for instance, could put together an annual slate that consists of only around 25 percent internationally oriented

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original productions (Darmon 2015b). The growth of the sales market thus is another historical change of which PFE was unlucky enough to be on the wrong side.

Production at PFE Leaving aside the various contextual factors that led to PFE’s demise, we can take some time to discuss the many works that emerged from its attempt to launch a global studio. As mentioned previously, these included many highly successful films in critical and commercial terms, along with some high-profile flops. Among this corpus we can see several favored modes and genres emerging. One of these was to combine auteur directors with genre material. A telling case in point in this regard would be the Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan), with whom PFE made some of the most important works for the studio and the filmmakers, including crime dramas like Fargo, comedies like Barton Fink (1993), and so on. The company also worked with Spike Jonze on the comedy Being John Malkovich (1999), David Lynch on his Bonnie and Clyde style road movie Wild at Heart (1990), and David Fincher on the mystery The Game (1997). This tendency, like many of the auteur-driven films of the period, can be seen as a continuation of sorts of ideas of the new Hollywood cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. Another tendency was to utilize historical material and literary sources to make the kind of middlebrow cinema that has been omnipresent in global European cinema as seen throughout this chapter. These included Elizabeth (Shekar Kapur, 1997), Jude (Michael Winterbottom, 1996), and Carrington (Christopher Hampton, 1995). Finally, the company worked in films with broad genre appeal including horror (e.g., Candyman [Bernard Rose, 1992]) and comedies (e.g., Drop Dead Fred [Ate de Jong, 1991]. The most successful of the latter would prove to be those that were British in terms of cultural content and setting as these set themselves apart from normative American fare. Major hits for the company in this vein included Bean (Mel Smith, 1997) and most importantly of all for PFE, Four Weddings and a Funeral which grossed over $200 million on a reported budget of $4 million. To create and market such a slate, PFE depended first on two primary production companies: the US-based Propaganda Films and Working Title, the British-based producers who specialized in middlebrow fare of various types as well as British-themed comedies. The other important part of PFE’s design

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that reflected the varieties of genres they worked was their distribution set up. This consisted of one US subsidiary in the form of Gramercy to handle the middlebrow, middle-budget fare, and other options for the bigger budget, more broadly commercial fare. These options were initially whichever major wanted to partner with PFE on any given project but later these films were handled by PFE’s new, bigger US distribution label PolyGram Films. In all respects then, PFE was set up to target the middlebrow and broader popular tastes and this was very much in keeping with how other major players of the period were configuring their specialty divisions. Miramax released their genre fare through their Dimension label; New Line and Fine Line functioned under the same umbrella with the same dual approaches; Focus had Rogue Pictures to handle its genre output; Sony Pictures Classics existed alongside Screen Gems; and so on. Such a dichotomous overarching design will be important for understanding Studiocanal’s set up in the contemporary period, even if some of the key middlebrow works are now television dramas instead of films.

Conclusion: Setting the stage The rise and fall of PFE and the larger backdrop of the 1990s presents a particularly opportune moment to shift from the historical survey phase of this book to an examination of Studiocanal’s growth into the studio they are today. Le Studio Canal Plus as it was initially known was born into the same landscape that PFE inhabited and indeed the two companies crossed paths numerous times during the 1990s. It is thus to a chronicle of the company’s fortunes that I now turn. As we will see, all of the issues that surfaced in this exploration of the history of European studios will be vital parts of understanding Studiocanal’s evolution into its current form.

2

Le Studio Canal Plus as “Dumb Money”: Working within Hollywood and Building a Library, 1990–99

To understand Studiocanal’s origins and development into an international player, we must begin with the story of its parent company Canal Plus. In the early 1980s, President Franҫois Mitterand set about diversifying France’s television industry by first creating a new private, pay-television network among other reforms (Iosifidis, Steemers, and Wheeler 2005, 36–38). Canal Plus was thus brought into being and was conceived as a subscription-based operator that was charged, among other things, with investing in film production by means of prepurchasing the broadcast rights to films. To this end, the government obligated the network to utilize 20 percent of its revenues in this manner. In return, Canal Plus would for a long time hold a veritable monopoly on paytelevision in France with sports and recently released films as its main attractions. Though the firm was obliged to purchase and show French and European films, it also showed many Hollywood films and by the early 1990s, buoyed by evergrowing subscriber numbers, Canal Plus was paying about $130 million per year for the rights to films from the American studios (Riding 1991). The exact year of the formation of Canal Plus’s production subsidiary remains somewhat disputed. Studiocanal’s own history posits 1986 as its beginnings as Canal Plus Productions, with a change of name in 1988 to Le Studio Canal Plus (“History”). Most historians (e.g., Buchsbaum 2017, 101), however, posit 1990 as the true date and indeed this is the year that the first mentions of the company are found in the trade press; these mentions being occasioned by the company’s investment in Carolco Productions, a decision that would profoundly shape the future of the new company. There were two primary reasons for incorporating a specialist production subsidiary at this point in Canal Plus’s history. The first of these, as Jonathan Buchsbaum shows, was to circumvent French prohibitions

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against television broadcasters becoming too directly involved in the production of films, reflecting an anxiety about television money making films less “cinematic” (2017, 101). Having a production company would thus allow Canal Plus to exert more influence over some of the local productions it supported. The second reason was related to all the money Canal Plus was paying out to Hollywood studios. René Bonnell, the newly christened CEO of Le Studio Canal Plus (henceforth LSC), told The New York Times about this strategy, saying only buying broadcast rights was “a bit like renting lots of apartments in a building. . . . You pay so much in rent that you might as well become a proprietor” (quoted in Riding 1991; see also Buchsbaum 2017, 102). Determined thusly to own some of the films that Canal Plus was showing, and thereby to profit from the overall success of those films, LSC came to Hollywood in the early 1990s, which, as was shown in the previous chapter, also happened to be one of the most tumultuous times in that industry’s history. The topsy-turvy conditions found in Hollywood in the early 1990s permitted LSC to take its first steps as a would-be international studio. To do so, the company struck deals with a number of producers but the two biggest deals were with companies that neatly demonstrate on one hand the chaotic mismanagement endemic in the period (mismanagement that still somehow produced many classic films) and the forward-thinking innovative entrepreneurialism of the period on the other. The two companies that embodied these qualities were Carolco and Regency Enterprises, respectively, and their work with LSC would produce some of the most important “American” films of the 1990s even while that work would also eventually scare the French company away from working in Hollywood for some years to come. In so doing, their work with LSC would help to shape the French company’s future direction and it continues to influence Studiocanal to this day.

Studiocanal and Carolco Of all the high-flying, big-spending ambitious companies that came to Hollywood in the 1980s, few carried as much of a high profile as Carolco Productions and few ultimately left as important of a legacy. Like most of the significant companies from the period, Carolco was founded by foreigners to the United States and to Hollywood. Lebanese-born Mario Kassar and Hungarianborn Andrew Vajna both had backgrounds in film distribution, Kassar in the Middle East and Vajna in the Far East (Easton 1990, 5). Their foray into making

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films in Hollywood depended on their knowledge of foreign markets and their ability to presell their projects in those markets. They had their first major hit with Rambo (Ted Kotcheff, 1982) and subsequently went on to make a number of big-budget star vehicles, including two sequels to Rambo as well as Red Heat (Walter Hill, 1988) and others. As the company grew it became famous for its free-spending ways, particularly the salaries it paid to its stars and directors and the overhead costs associated with Kassar’s reputed fondness for private jets and yachts. The company began to run into financial difficulties in the late 1980s and reached out to some of the foreign buyers who had become regular costumers for its films. This led them to receive equity investments from LSC as well as Italy’s RCS Video and Japan’s Pioneer Electronics. As the 1990s progressed, the company’s financial difficulties worsened, leading to rounds of cash infusions from the equity investors. In 1995 the company was forced to declare bankruptcy and LSC counted its final losses in the hundreds of millions (Johnson and Orange 2004, 82). LSC would later outbid Fox for much of the company’s library for a further $58 million (Bates 1996). Though it lasted only a short period of time and ended badly, the partnership between LSC and Carolco did produce some of the most memorable blockbusters of the early 1990s. These included Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoven, 1992), Stargate (Roland Emmerich, 1994), Cliffhanger (Renny Harlin, 1993), and Terminator 2 (James Cameron, 1991). Besides these big-budget spectaculars, the company also made a number of respected middlebrow and arthouse films before and after LSC’s investment, though these did not typically fare very well at the box office. (“[Audiences] want crap. Every time people tell you they don’t, it’s bull. They want crap” company CEO Peter Hoffman once told a reporter [quoted in Easton 1990].) Films in this vein included Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990), The Doors (Oliver Stone, 1991), and Chaplin (Richard Attenborough, 1994). As a producer whose business plan hinged on the success of a small number of films being released annually (between three and eight per year across the life of the company), Carolco’s fortunes varied wildly based on the performance of its films. The company’s overheads made it more difficult to stay afloat even when their films were successful, but Carolco also faced a problem that is common to all producers working in Hollywood. This was the fact that distribution is the most powerful segment of the industry and the Hollywood majors are particularly notorious for positioning themselves, often using practices euphemistically

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known as “creative accounting,” to profit from any given film’s success at the expense of producers (for a discussion of this practice, see Wasko 2003, 99–101). While some producers can use their track record and other resources to leverage better deals (as was/is the case with LSC’s other Hollywood partner in this period), this has never been the norm and typically producers are on the losing end of deals with the studios. Regardless of the general fortunes of producers in Hollywood, it is definitely the case with Carolco that as time went by and the company’s financial footing worsened, that TriStar (the company’s US distribution partner on many of its films) began to use its clout to negotiate better terms for the distributor at the expense of Carolco (Wyatt 2000, 148; see Cliffhanger case study below). Struggling under the weight of its spending, its box office failures in the mid-1990s and the disadvantageous terms of its distribution deals, Carolco was forced into bankruptcy in 1995. The losses felt by LSC in the Carolco debacle were heavy. The company had provided the producers with rounds of cash infusions and had also stumped up to cover budget overruns on some films. In one case, the film Stargate (Roland Emmerich, 1994) LSC had to provide the entire production budget for the film, a total of $55 million including substantial overruns from the original budget (see case study). In total the losses were so extensive that the company pulled out of Hollywood altogether, backing out of a more successful deal with Regency Enterprises, a deal that will be discussed below. But it is important to note that an important lesson could be observed in the Carolco imbroglio regarding the positioning of the company in the international market. That lesson was that equity and production were not the places to be and that Carolco’s ability to navigate foreign markets could not protect it completely from the power of its US distributors. These dynamics could be altered perhaps if the international market were to grow in the way they did later in the 2000s, but for now Carolco was in a weak position. LSC was at a double disadvantage in its dealings with Carolco: not only was it in the least powerful part of the business, that being production, but it also only owned an equity position in the overall company. Even if Carolco had been better managed, LSC would have likely waited years to see any returns on the films it invested in due to the indirect position in the value chain that it had assumed. This disadvantageous position, however, still clearly came with enormous risks, making this a poor business proposition in that it featured high risk and promised a low return. A higher position in the value chain was clearly needed, meaning the company would have to look to sales and distribution

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rather than just production if it wanted to reduce the chances of this happening again. This lesson would seem to guide some of its later decisions when it came to later dealings in the international market.

Case study: Cliffhanger LSC and Carolco together made some of the most important blockbusters of the early 1990s and for this reason Terminator 2 or Basic Instinct would perhaps seem like ideal case studies for understanding the relationship between the two companies. While it was well reviewed (on the terms of a work of escapist entertainment1) and a box office success, Cliffhanger is not by any measure a classic film on par with some of its peers. It is, however, a film that can tell us a great deal about Carolco’s production and artistic practices while also vividly demonstrating the financial fragilities of the company, fragilities that would ultimately lead to its demise. In this way, it is the quintessential Carolco film. It is also equally illustrative of LSC’s role in the international cinema of the early 1990s and, anticipating some of the later developments in Studiocanal’s strategies

Figure 1 Sylvester Stallone and Janine Turner in Cliffhanger.

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in the 2010s, it is a film that demonstrates the ways in which the company would reinvent itself as a library and distribution-focused company in the main period with which this book is concerned. By the time Cliffhanger was in preproduction in 1991–92 the cracks in Carolco’s finances were already apparent with the company’s stock price falling under the weight of overhead costs and failed attempts to expand into home video distribution. These woes, combined with a loss of $91 million in the first three quarters of 1991, led the company to seek investment from LSC and a number of other foreign companies (Wyatt 2000, 148). These mounting problems notwithstanding, Kassar began assembling Cliffhanger, a film initially budgeted at $47 million and yet another high-concept star vehicle for Sylvester Stallone, whose Rambo films had helped to put Carolco on the map in the 1980s. As was the case with all of Carolco’s most famous works, the film’s budget included a lavish fee for the star, in this case $15 million initially (Fleming 1992). As was the case with many of the most famous Carolco films, it also promptly ran over budget as costs for special effects and stunts (including a $1 million dollar fee paid to a stuntman for an actual leap from one plane to another in midair during the filming of the hijacking scene2), as well as weather problems drove the budget into the $70 million range, as much as $26 million over the original budget (Fleming 1992). Some of this money (reportedly about $8–$10 million for the weather-related delays) would later be recouped from insurers, but the money had to be found in the short term and to get it Carolco once again turned to their consortium of foreign investors, including LSC to kick in additional funds to save the production (Fleming 1992). The film itself was every inch the classical high-concept action spectacular for which Carolco had become famous. As is indicated in the punning title, much of the action took place on cliff sides and spectacular ones at that, with location shooting in Italy and Colorado helping to drive up costs but also to provide visually stunning backdrops. The film opens with an action sequence (the failed rescue of Hal’s [Michael Rooker] girlfriend from the top of a mountain) and very little time passes in the film without another taking place. For the most part these are genuinely thrilling at a visceral level. Visually, we see the spectacular vistas nearly as much as we see Stallone’s muscle-bound physique. All the characters are thoroughly one dimensional with villain Quelan played with an extravagance that borders on camp by John Lithgow. As was often the case in 1980s and 1990s action films, this performance includes a slight British accent accompanied by effete mannerisms. Similarly the villain’s gang includes

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a stereotypically sexualized black man who threatens to rape Jessie (Janine Turner) and a host of other sadists coded visually or by accent as “other.” Besides inventing excuses for action sequences, the screenwriters seem to have spent most of their time crafting one-liners for Stallone and Lithgow, in a way that, again, was typical of the action films of the period. In these ways the film closely resembles the Taken brand of action film that would become so important to Studiocanal later in its history, but the important difference would prove to be the budgetary discipline in later European films as EuropaCorp, Studiocanal, and others have kept budgets in the medium range by Hollywood standards, whereas Carolco did nothing of the sort. Whether it was because of its high-concept generic design, its production values or the marketing prowess of TriStar, the film was a hit in the United States, grossing over $84 million at the box office. Perhaps more importantly for the Carolco ethos of filmmaking, it was even a bigger success internationally grossing over $250 million worldwide in total. But TriStar’s distribution deal with Carolco kept the producer (and its equity partners) from realizing any return on the film and this is crucial for appreciating the flaws in the company’s management culture and business model. As the budget escalated during the production, Carolco was forced to approach TriStar for more and more money, but the distributor was very savvy about these requests and used them as leverage for a better deal. The studio began with US theatrical rights but by the end of the making of the film, controlled all US rights as well as those of France, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and Germany. Speaking to the trade press, an executive at TriStar explained their negotiations: “Cliffhanger would never have been made if we hadn’t stepped in when Carolco asked us to restructure the financing of the film and agreed to increase our investment to become the dominant investor in the film.” The same article quotes an unnamed Carolco employee as saying, bluntly “We have the worst distribution deal possible . . . we get no returns” (Rothman 1993). With Carolco seeing no returns, the company’s equity partners likewise lost out, having not shown the same guile as their Hollywood counterparts in negotiating the extra financing. Cliffhanger, like the entirety of the Carolco experience, was thus an expensive lesson for LSC, but the film has had an interesting afterlife that shows how the new-look Studiocanal has tried to profit from its past experiences. This part of the film’s story begins with LSC’s purchase of the Carolco catalog in 1996. Hoping to cash in on the library in ways beyond simple licensing of the titles themselves, the current version of Studiocanal has partnered with

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James Cameron to create a 3D version of Terminator 2 which was released theatrically in 2017, while also trying to find ways to exploit other titles in the catalog. Significantly, these efforts also include the development of a remake of Cliffhanger. The company first publicly announced its efforts to get the film remade in 2009 (Hopewell and Keslassy) and revealed that a screenwriter had been hired to carry out the adaptation in 2014 (Fleming). In undertaking such a project, Studiocanal is in a sense acknowledging the ways in which its contemporary production philosophy is not altogether different from that which it supported at Carolco. After all, if it were to materialize, this would be a male star-led action film, much akin to those it has made in recent years. Indeed at the time of writing, Studiocanal is in production on Hard Powder, a film set in the Rocky Mountains with a high-concept title, promising yet another violent revenge story starring Liam Neeson. There is a significant difference between Hard Powder and other contemporary Studiocanal action films and Cliffhanger, however. Most of the Studiocanal action titles feature older male stars, whereas Cliffhanger and the Carolco oeuvre generally featured “A-list” younger stars at or near the prime of their careers, one reason for their exorbitant salaries and the films’ inflated budgets. But Studiocanal’s production practices in the contemporary period do include high-budget studio co-productions with A-list stars (see, for instance, The Tourist), so it will be a matter of seeing how the remake gets packaged in terms of stars and budget, if indeed it gets made at all, before we can assess the full degree of continuity between Studiocanal today and LSC in the early 1990s. That said, there remains at least one very compelling parallel between the companies, beyond genre and usage of stardom. A central one is the fundamental importance of international markets to both Carolco and Studiocanal today. Studiocanal, unlike its former partner, has the luxury of a much larger international market for films, with many markets such as China opening up in recent years. These markets have so far proven very receptive to action and spectacle-driven films and they have particularly embraced Hollywood’s aging male stars. Such dynamics have allowed films like The Expendables (Sylvester Stallone, 2010) and its sequels to find audiences while individual stars such as Vin Diesel have prospered long after their careers in Hollywood were thought to have peaked, making a reboot of the long-forgotten XXX franchise in 2017 viable (xXx [sic] 3: The Return of Xander Cage [DJ Caruso]). Studiocanal’s former CEO Olivier Courson openly touted a Cliffhanger reboot or sequel as the type of film that would be likely to succeed in China (quoted in Hopewell

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and Keslassy 2014). For these reasons, the choice of producer involved in the reboot is very interesting. Neal Moritz has been developing the project since at least 2009 and his production company (Original Films) is remarkable for its expertise in reboots and franchises, having made The Fast and the Furious films as well as reboots such as 21 Jump Street (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, 2012), the recent relaunch of the television series Prison Break (Fox, 2017) and the aforementioned xXx 3 among others. It is also remarkable for its commercial success in the Chinese market. Not only have The Fast and the Furious and the latest installment of the xXx franchises proven extraordinarily popular there, but other Moritz/Original works such as Passengers (Morten Tyldum, 2016) have been as well.3 As contemporary Studiocanal thus strategically pursues its global ambitions, the works of its failed partner Carolco are of increasing importance and it just remains to be seen whether the company will now be able to profit where it once stumbled so badly.

Case study: Stargate (Roland Emmerich, 1994) At a reported budget of $55 million, which LSC fully financed, Stargate remains to this day the largest investment that any form of Studiocanal has made in the production of a single film. It would not be until Paddington in 2014 that the company would make a comparable investment, but twenty years of inflation make that investment significantly smaller than its predecessor. (Paddington 2 [Paul King, 2017] is said to have cost more than the original, but its exact cost has not yet been disclosed; it would have to cost about $89 million to equal Stargate’s budget when inflation is factored in.4) Stargate was thus the most ambitious project that the company has ever been involved in, and its attempt at creating an epic science fiction spectacular from a European base puts the film in a long tradition of European science fiction epics that stretches from Metropolis to Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. While the films that bookend this tradition may have been conspicuous commercial and critical failures despite their considerable technical achievements, some of the intervening films such as The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997) have had considerable success on both fronts. At the time of its release, Stargate was a popular success, even while critics pilloried the film for its predictable plot and campy production values, and in the years since it played in cinemas, the film has spawned a number of spinoffs and has attracted a large and dedicated following.

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Figure 2 Sci-Fi Spectacle in Stargate.

While it may have ultimately proved a success, during and immediately after its production the film was in a series of precarious positions. During preproduction, as was the case with virtually every Carolco production, the film’s budget escalated substantially from an initial projection of $42 million to a final total of $55 million. Salaries were once again very lavish with star Kurt Russell making a reported $7 million, which was rumored to be more than twice his usual fee (Moerk 1994). Jaye Davidson, who appears only briefly in the film as the villain Ra, was paid $1 million for his services, an extravagant figure that the actor had reportedly demanded as a tactic to avoid appearing in the movie, hoping to dissuade the producers with a unrealistically high fee (IMDB trivia). Substantial costs were also incurred during a lengthy preproduction process that was reported to have been caused by LSC’s “micromanagement” of the project (Moerk 1994). Most worrying of all, however, were not the project’s costs but instead its US distribution partner, or more precisely the lack thereof. As opposed to the vast majority of Carolco’s productions at that time, Stargate started and finished principal photography without a US distributor on board. Once the film was complete in early 1994, LSC and Carolco were facing the possibility of not having a way to sell the film in the world’s biggest market in time for the planned global rollout of the film later that year. (Carolco chief Mario Kassar had already presold the film to a number of international markets [Natale 1994].) The companies ultimately did find a US distributor in the form of MGM, itself a company reeling from management crises and in need of a substantial hit to restore its reputation in Hollywood. It also helped in this case that MGM was

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owned at the time by French bank Credit Lyonnais, whose management team had close ties to that of LSC (Moerk 1994). MGM reportedly paid $25–$30 million for domestic distribution rights to the film while also agreeing to foot the bill for marketing costs in that territory (Natale 1994). The release of the film was very successful, with the film opening number one in the country on its way to a domestic gross of over $70 million and a global total of nearly $200 million. Pierre Lescure, then head of Canal Plus, was quick to seize on the film’s success (only weeks after the film’s US release) as proof of the sustainability of LSC’s global ambitions (Boudier 1994b), but it would only be a year later that Carolco would be declaring bankruptcy, leading LSC to pull out of Hollywood for the time being. Despite Carolco’s woes, Stargate went on to build a strong cult following. This was due in part to the film’s US marketing campaign, which targeted tech savvy young men. The film was reportedly the first studio release to have its own website and MGM also undertook partnerships with companies such as CompuServe and performed the then very novel publicity stunt of uploading the film’s trailer on the internet (Natale 1994). The enduring popularity of the film led to its reincarnation as a transmedia franchise, one of the most sought after forms of success in the conglomerate era of media ownership. The film spawned book and videogame spinoffs, but its most profitable and longrunning afterlife was in the realm of TV drama. Stargate SG-1 was launched on the American network Showtime and ran for a combined ten years there and on the Syfy cable network. Other series followed and in total these generated over 300 episodes which were distributed to a large and very loyal global fan base. Interest in the franchise led to an announcement in 2014 that the film would be “rebooted” as a trilogy of films to be made by the original film’s director Roland Emmerich and producer/screenwriter Dean Devlin (Kroll 2014). In addition to this film reboot, MGM in 2017 announced the development of a new Stargate series (Stargate Origins) as well as a subscription VOD service entitled Stargate Command which links users to the entire library of Stargate spinoffs (Petski 2017). The film’s afterlife thus continues to demonstrate the importance and long-standing influence of LSC’s and Carolco’s work in the 1990s. However influential this specific work has been, LSC/Studiocanal have seen relatively little of the long-term benefits of its success. While the company retained rights to the original film via its purchase of the Carolco library in 1996, Roland Emmerich retained the rights to sequels and remakes and promptly sold

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these to MGM. It was this studio, not LSC, which oversaw the making of Stargate SG-1 and other television series. MGM also partnered with Warner Bros. on the attempted reboot of the franchise in 2014. While it acquired the company’s library and some sequel and remake rights, LSC missed out on many of what would prove to be the most valuable rights in the auctions that followed its subsidiary’s demise, including those for The Terminator franchise, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct, all of which have spawned sequels, remakes and in the case of the science fiction films, videogames. This is not to even mention Carolco’s rights to adapt Spiderman, which could have given LSC an interest in the now booming industry of comic book adaptations. Given Studiocanal’s current interest in multiplatform franchises, Stargate and much of the intellectual property it helped develop at Carolco must seem like the proverbial fish that got away.

LSC and Regency Enterprises LSC’s other major production partner in the 1990s in some ways resembled Carolco but Regency Enterprises, run by Israeli businessman Arnon Milchan, would prove to be much more successful than Kassar’s outfit for a number of reasons. The two companies shared their outsider statuses in Hollywood, with Milchan being an Israeli national that came from a background far removed from the film industry. Like many of the foreigners working in Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s, Milchan had a questionable past that caused some to wonder about the sources of his money (he had inherited a chemical manufacturing plant from his father but had made most of his money as an illegal arms trader and spy for Israel, reputedly helping the country to build its first nuclear weapon [Doron and Gelman 2011]). Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, his purported fortune did not get squandered. More importantly his skills at running a production company were genuine and over the course of the 1980s and early 1990s he financed and produced films ranging from The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1983) to Pretty Woman (Gary Marshall, 1990). Riding high on the success of the latter film in particular, Milchan sought to set up a company capable of greenlighting its own big-budget films which would be guaranteed distribution (and cofinancing) of its products by the Hollywood majors, a company thus not unlike Carolco. To do so, he signed a distribution pact with Warner Bros. and raised approximately $900 million, including a reported $270 million from LSC (Williams 1991) along with investment from

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German partners Scriba & Deyhle. The company was christened Regency Enterprises and its business model involved producing an initial twenty films for Warner Bros. with the studio taking a discounted distribution fee estimated to be between 15 percent and 25 percent (Williams 1991; typically, studios charge a distribution fees of over 30 percent [Ulin 2014, 126]). Once Milchan’s company was up and running it would become one of the most successful production companies in recent Hollywood history, churning out commercial hits and Oscar winners for over twenty years including JFK (Oliver Stone, 1993), Heat (Michael Mann, 1995), LA Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997), Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), Man on Fire (Tony Scott, 2004), Twelve Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013), The Revenant (Alejandro Iñárritu, 2015), and many others. Along the way, the company had many flops as well and also changed studios from Warner Bros. to Fox, but its consistent success over such a long period of time has set a model that others have tried to emulate. Indeed, there exists in Hollywood now a number of production companies set up by billionaires and/or successful producers intent on financing films in exchange for discounted distribution fees from the majors, such as DreamWorks/Amblin, Legendary Entertainment, and Media Rights Capital to name just a few. Few have had the sustained run of success that Milchan/ Regency has had, however. To return to the very beginning of Regency’s run as a quasi-autonomous producer, we can focus once again on LSC’s involvement in the company. During the early 1990s, Regency would make ten films with LSC’s funds, with LSC backing out of the deal without exercising its option to invest in an additional four to ten films (Bates 1993). The exact terms of the investment in these ten films were never publicized, but industry publications estimate that LSC held about a 30 percent stake in each of the films made for under $30 million and that LSC invested approximately $5–$10 million in each project, plus additional sums for French television rights (Williams 1993). The deal produced several major hits including JFK, the Steven Seagal starring action film Under Siege (Andrew Davis, 1992), Free Willy (Simon Wincer, 1993), and Sommersby (Jon Amiel, 1993). There were also notable flops, including the bigbudget dud Memoirs of an Invisible Man (John Carpenter, 1992), but such can be expected when investing in a broad slate of films. Toby Miller and his colleagues say that this pact incurred “heavy losses” (2001, 105) for LSC, but there is no clear evidence of this being the case. Instead, reporting at the time suggested that it was LSC’s losses at Carolco that led Canal Plus to demand that LSC exit

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Hollywood altogether, meaning it would discontinue its deal with Regency regardless of the profitability of the deal (Bates 1993).

Case study: Sommersby (John Amiel, 1993) Martin Guerre did well in America. But people don’t want to read subtitles and when the studios talk box office they’re talking millions and not thousands. —Nicholas Meyer, co-screenwriter of Sommersby (quoted in Zemon Davis 1995, 18). Just as was the case with the previous discussion of Carolco, LSC, and Cliffhanger, there would seem to be more likely candidates for a case study than Sommersby. While the film was in commercial terms very successful (grossing over $140 million worldwide on a budget that, given the terms of the LSC-Regency deal, can be assumed to have been under $30 million), it had neither the critical cachet of JFK nor the franchise staying power of films like Free Willy or Under Siege. Nevertheless, the film is important as the first remake that LSC would be involved in and therefore it foreshadows the next major development in the history of the company, which entailed purchasing vast libraries of content to later mine those libraries for remake and rebooting opportunities. Based on Le retour de Martin Guerre (Daniel Vigne, 1982), Sommersby is one of the last in a series of high-profile remakes of French films to emerge from

Figure 3 Richard Gere and Jodie Foster in Sommersby.

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Hollywood in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This wave of production resulted in a number of hits for the studios, including comedies such as Three Men and a Baby (Leonard Nimoy, 1987) and Three Fugitives (Francis Veber, 1989) (Mazdon 2000, 51–90). Of these, Sommersby would ultimately prove to be one of the most popular in the United States with its box office performance ranking third overall among the remakes, behind only Three Men and The Toy (Richard Donner, 1982) (Mazdon 2000, 52). As Mazdon (2000), Vervis (2006), and many others have shown, remaking and “readapting” is a very old practice in film history. As a practice within the international film industry, remaking across cultural lines (as opposed to remakes of older films from within the same culture) has traditionally been perceived as an expression of power in which stronger industries “take” ideas from smaller ones, with the most typical relationship and power dynamic being seen in Hollywood appropriating films from other nations. This practice is then typically received by critics and the general public as producing inherently inferior and “unoriginal” works, but such a popular attitude, as Mazdon has shown, often relies on largely untested assumptions that associate Hollywood with commercial cinema and the rest of the world generally and Europe in particular with highbrow ideals of artistic cinematic practice (2000, 2015). That such binaries are misleading have been demonstrated repeatedly throughout the history of “Hollywood” remakes, including Sommersby which was after all cofinanced by a European company in the form of LSC (Mazdon 2000, 69). Though cultural affinities between LSC and the original film must surely have been apparent to the company during the remake process, we should not overstate the importance of the French partner to the making of Sommersby. The decision to go ahead with a remake of The Return of Martin Guerre was by all accounts made at Regency and Warner Bros. As is indicated in the quote from Nicholas Meyer that opens this section of the chapter, the thinking here was commercial first and foremost and sought to build on the moderate success of the French original in the United States to achieve commercial success on a much bigger scale. LSC was during this period largely a passive investor in Regency’s projects, meaning that Milchan and his partner Steven Reuther generated the projects and then secured the backing of the equity partners. It was at that point that LSC would have had to have the cultural awareness to know about the original film and on that basis to make an informed decision about its likely popularity. The film itself, as Mazdon (2000, 69–78), Humbert (2001), and others have argued, is not a faithful transposition of the French original. Instead it

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significantly transforms the main character, plot, and themes besides the more obvious changes in setting, language, and cast. The collective impact of all these changes made Jack Sommersby (Richard Gere) a more dashing, romantic, and ultimately Christian figure than his eponymous French counterpart, played by Gerard Depardieu (Humbert 2001, 11–12). Instead of his fate inviting us to question the nature of identity like Martin Guerre’s did, his self-sacrifice in the Hollywood version is an iteration of the Christian ideals of a sinner finding redemption and dying so that others (in this case the villagers who will be buying the land of Jack Sommersby) may prosper and so that Laurel will avoid the social stigma of adultery and bearing a child out of wedlock (13). This nobility of spirit that is endowed to the Jack/Martin figure is matched in a sense by the film’s style and production values which include a sweeping score, and in visual terms at least an idyllic rendering of supposed rural poverty, a point of sharp contrast with the bleak penury of medieval France seen in the original film. And, of course, the Hollywood version utilized stardom in a different way, with two of the most in-demand global stars of the time in the lead roles: Gere was still at this point riding high on the success of Pretty Woman and Jodie Foster, playing somewhat against type in a romantic role, having just made her iconic turn as FBI agent Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991). The film’s romantic elements were enough to overcome some negative critical reviews—reviews which often compared it unfavorably to Martin Guerre (e.g., Ebert 1993b)—and achieve commercial success not only in the United States but also in international markets, from which it got nearly two thirds of its box office takings. Significantly, the film performed very well in France and Europe generally, outperforming the original in all cases (Humbert 2001, 19), meaning that, countering Meyer’s quote above, the Hollywood version was popular even where audiences would not have to read subtitles, given the culture of audiodubbing in continental Europe. Besides generating more money than the original, Sommersby also had the salubrious effect of increasing awareness of the original film (Mazdon 2000, 78). Seeing the commercial possibilities inherent in remaking up close would be very important in the larger context of LSC’s development in the rest of the decade before its transition to Studiocanal in 2000. From this point on, as will be detailed later in the book, the company became very active in remakes as a seller of rights. This in turn would form a part of a larger shift in the international film industry generally that as we will see further complicates the idea of remaking as something that Hollywood/America does to Europe.

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London-based partnerships Regardless of its generally more stable partnership with Regency, the losses from the Carolco debacle (and likely, the embarrassment entailed therein) led to LSC’s withdrawal from Hollywood in the mid-1990s. But this hardly meant that the company would cease international operations. Instead, the company pursued two major initiatives throughout the rest of the decade. One of these was to build its library of film rights, a strategic development at Canal Plus that the bulk of the rest of the chapter will chronicle. The other major initiative was once again focused on production, this being an attempt to build an Anglophone production presence in Europe. This initiative took two forms, one being a short-lived joint venture with Sony to create Equinox, a studio to be based in the UK and dedicated to making films costing between $5 and $15 million each (“Sony Floats” 1995). Sony would then have controlled theatrical distribution of the films while LSC would manage European television rights. The joint venture was built out from a screenwriting training program the two companies sponsored based in London that same year which sought to teach Hollywood-style development techniques to European-based screenwriters. For LSC, this initiative was in part rooted in their desire to avoid some of the mistakes it made in Hollywood earlier in the decade, a desire that can be seen in the modest budgets, but cultural factors were also at play in this new venture. As the reporters for the Variety write up noted, executives at LSC were likely hoping “that getting into the English-language film business will be less of a risk if it involves working between Paris and London rather than Paris and Hollywood” (1995). The other major undertaking in this vein during this period was TOC Films, a company formed by LSC in partnership with French firm Téléma in 1996. Like Equinox, the company’s headquarters was set up in London. The company was incorporated for four years before shutting down in 2000, having developed three projects in total and produced one finished film: Hotel Splendide (Terrence Gross, 2000) which received little distribution even in the UK. Téléma and Studiocanal would collaborate again, however, on the Englishlanguage film Intimacy which was directed by Patrice Chereau and released in 2001 to moderate commercial success (1.4 million admissions across Europe) and lukewarm critical reviews. These ventures were thus not very successful, but they are nonetheless telling of LSC’s ambitions at the time. We should thus view them in the context

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of the booming international popularity of British-themed production in the mid-1990s. Films such as The Crying Game, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Howards End, and others had made outsized returns on small budgets and this trend would continue throughout the decade in the form of films such as Trainspotting, Shakespeare in Love, and The Full Monty. The success of these films and others were a boon to American independent distributors such as the pre-Disney Miramax, Hollywood “Indiewood” divisions such as the post-Disney Miramax and Fox Searchlight and would-be European studios such as PolyGram. Getting into this business was thus a logical goal for LSC and the deliberateness of this strategy can be seen in TOC partner Charles Gassot’s description of that venture as a “European Miramax” (quoted in Arbaudie 1996). Besides Equinox and TOC, LSC also invested in a number of one-off projects, such as the period biopic Carrington, anticipating in many ways two significant attempts by later iterations of LSC/Studiocanal to target the middlebrow that will be explored in subsequent chapters: the production alliance with London-based Working Title in the 2000s (Chapter 3) and the broader push into middlebrow cinema and television in the 2010s (Chapter 4), a move that also included a great deal of collaboration with Working Title.

Library acquisitions The other major strategic push by LSC and parent company Canal Plus during the second half of the decade that is significant, perhaps even fundamental, for the long-term direction of the company can be seen in their efforts to acquire libraries of film content. In total, the two companies acquired three major libraries during the decade, though two of those also included other companies’ libraries, effectively putting LSC and Canal Plus in the position of amalgamating several large catalogs. The companies also lodged unsuccessful bids for a number of other libraries of content during this period, including those of Hollywood studio MGM, which was put on the block several times in the 1990s. This final section of the chapter will trace the development of the company’s library of film and TV rights essentially from scratch at the outset of the company’s launch to possessing approximately 9,000 titles at the latest count in 2017 (Studiocanal, “Library”). In so doing, this section will attempt to foreshadow later developments at the company which grew directly out of

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the library as well as illustrating just how important catalogs are to studios and why the possession of one is so significant in the case of Studiocanal. As was intimated in the discussion of PFE in Chapter 1, this is nothing short of a historical innovation for European studios and one that more than any other separates the company from many of its predecessors. We should not, however, give too much credit here when it comes to longterm studio planning on the part of LSC. Instead, the main driving force for acquiring libraries in the 1990s came from Canal Plus itself, which set up a subsidiary called Canal Plus DA that was tasked with these purchases. This subsidiary was set up not with the idea of building an integrated studio in mind, but instead with the goal of a pan-European pay-television network on the horizon. Canal Plus had by the mid-1990s expanded via joint ventures and acquisitions to many European countries and this would accelerate later in the decade as it diversified into satellite broadcasting. Seeing the inevitable need for content that this expansion would occasion, the company formed a partnership with Germany’s Bertelsmann to create a $2 billion fund to acquire and distribute the broadcast rights to films and television series. The strategic focus for this venture would be Anglophone content that would be universally in demand across Europe (Boudier 1994a). Where appropriate, the new subsidiary would be expected to work with LSC on acquiring and managing the content. The first two acquisitions made by LSC/Canal Plus DA were extremely opportunistic in nature. By buying the catalogs of the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (in 1994, from Carolco) and Carolco itself (in 1996), the company was attempting to take advantage of the receding fortunes of some of the high fliers of the 1980s and 1990s. As discussed in the previous chapters, both companies had gone bankrupt pursuing the new opportunities that were flowing into Hollywood at the time. DEG’s library, which contained over 300 titles and was bought for approximately $60 million (Boudier 1994b), resembled Carolco’s in many respects, particularly those titles from its first years of operation (1986–88). There are a number of big-budget star vehicles to be found here including the Arnold Schwarzenegger action film Raw Deal (John Irvin, 1986) and the special effects driven film King Kong Lives (John Guillermin, 1986). As the 1980s progressed, however, and DEG’s products faltered at the box office, the company’s output came to be dominated by low-budget fare including horror films (e.g., Pumpkinhead [Stan Winston, 1988] and Dracula’s Widow [Christopher Coppolla, 1988]) and comedies (e.g., Earth Girls are Easy [Julien Temple, 1988] and Illegally Yours [Peter Bogdanovich, 1988]). Although it can

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count three very important works of the 1980s among its filmography—Blue Velvet, Evil Dead 2 (Sam Raimi, 1987), and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure— DEG’s productions include little else that would seem to be of enduring cultural or commercial value. Instead it was the library of Embassy Pictures, which DEG had acquired at the outset of its brief run in Hollywood, that has proven to be the more important catalog for LSC/Studiocanal. Embassy, founded and managed for a time by Joseph Levine, was discussed in the previous chapter as an importer and producer of European films, but the company was also involved with other kinds of projects. In keeping with what Levine biographer McKenna describes as the company’s “scattergun approach” (2016, 129), Embassy would end up producing films ranging from the arthouse classic Contempt, the generational film that helped to define the “new” Hollywood cinema The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), the colonial action film Zulu (Cy Endfield, 1964), and others such as the low-budget horror film Disciple of Death (Tom Parkinson, 1971). As it grew and changed management (the company merged with AVCO in 1964, Levine left in 1974), the company managed to make a number of films that can be reasonably called if not outright genre classics, at least durably popular titles such as The Producers (Mel Brooks, 1967), The Howling (Joe Dante, 1981), and two films directed by cult auteur John Carpenter, The Fog (1980) and Escape from New York (1981). Many of these titles would go on to be important parts of the development of Studiocanal in later years, particularly Escape from New York, which at the time of writing is in development with Fox as the first part of a potential “tent pole” franchise. By this point in the story of LSC, there is little further that needs to be said here about the content of the Carolco library when it comes to qualities of the films themselves. The deal that LSC made for library, and perhaps more importantly the deals that it did not make at this time, however, do merit more attention. In agreeing to buy the company’s library, LSC outbid Hollywood major Fox with a bid of $58 million. Fox’s final offer for the library was reported to be $50 million and besides the rights to the completed films would have also included rights to projects in development by the company, including projects such as an adaptation of Spiderman which was at the time being developed by James Cameron (Bates 1996). LSC’s bid was only for the films and crucially did not include neither the development projects nor sequel and remake rights to key films such as The Terminator, Basic Instinct, Total Recall, and Stargate. These rights were ultimately auctioned off separately and were acquired by rival studios

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and in the case of The Terminator, Carolco founding partners Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna. Taken together these rights would prove very valuable indeed as each spawned sequels, reboots, and other lucrative opportunities. The later form of Studiocanal would seek out such opportunities for other titles, but LSC at this fateful juncture missed out on what would seem to have been the most valuable parts of the Carolco sell-off. The largest and most important library acquisition made by LSC/Canal Plus DA in this period was that of UGC DA, which was made in 1996, the same year as the Carolco acquisition. Like the DEG acquisition, this purchase also included a library-within-a-library. In addition to the UGC DA catalog of French films, which on its own consisted of 1,900 French titles including classic works from the 1930s through to the 1990s (Lamassoure 1995), the catalog also included the EMI-Weintraub library. The availability of this catalog itself was another opportunity occasioned by the instability of the independent sector in the 1980s and early 1990s as it was sold to the then high-flying Cannon Group in 1986 only to be sold on to the Weintraub Group in 1987 as Cannon’s finances soured. Weintraub itself went bankrupt in 1990 and sold the rights to the library to UGC DA, a firm specialized in film rights management. The EMI-Weintraub library included over 2,000 British films, including those of the renowned Ealing Studios, Woodfall Films and genre and arthouse titles from the 1960s and 1970s. All told, this purchase gave Canal Plus/LSC the rights to a considerable chunk of the artistic and cultural patrimony of Britain and France, including many of the most famous works by renowned directors Alexander Mackendrick, Tony Richardson, Nicholas Roeg, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean Renoir, and many others. In total, the combined libraries owned by UGC DA totaled 5,000 films and 2,000 hours of television content, exponentially growing Canal Plus DA’s library virtually overnight from a previous total of 650 titles to over 6,000 (Lamassoure 1996). In addition to the catalogs it did acquire, Canal Plus DA and LSC also bid on a number of others, including the Epic library which PFE eventually purchased (Peers and Weiner 1997) and PFE’s library when it was put up for sale by Seagram’s (Peers 1998). Even if these bids were not successful, the intention to build a large library was clear. The assembly of such a catalog, which would keep growing up to the present day as the company produced more works and made smaller acquisitions of various producers’ and distributors’ libraries, marked a fundamental change in the company. As such, the effects of this purchase will be traced throughout this book. How this came to be will be a significant subplot in

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the overall story of Studiocanal, vindicating Puttnam’s prediction that a library was necessary to build a European studio. To return to the late 1990s, this was seemingly not the master plan at Canal Plus, where attention was primarily fixed on marketing the library to television networks. We can thus see one of the most crucial steps in rebuilding Studiocanal into a major international force as something of a happy accident or at least an unintentional byproduct of a strategy which had different aims altogether.

Conclusion: The calm before the storm The end of the 1990s found LSC seeking to recover from its bruising experience in Hollywood, a foray which saw the company act as the stereotype of Hollywood’s “dumb money,” having naively overpaid for participation in the world’s biggest film industry without getting much to show for their efforts (Miller et al. 2001, 105). A major library of content was now in place, even if the prices were at times high and key rights were lost. The company was now unsuccessfully pursuing other avenues of getting into Anglophone production, but at least the financial stakes seemed more manageable. But any thought that LSC or Canal Plus were in for a long-term period of stability and steady building toward their global ambitions would have to ignore the gathering clouds on the horizon in the form of Jean-Marie Messier. Messier, then chairman of water utility Compagnie Général des Eaux, a major shareholder in Canal Plus, announced a plan in 1999 to take over the pay-television network and to create Vivendi. This would be the beginning of a series of events that would turn LSC and the rest of Canal Plus and much of the media world on its head, endangering the very idea of an integrated global European major. LSC would become Studiocanal during this period and rise dramatically in global prominence, before nearly being disbanded and reemerging a humbler company nonetheless intent once again on expansion, though on different terms.

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Surviving Jean-Marie Messier and Vivendi Universal: 1999–2006

The early 2000s would prove to be the most difficult years in the history of Studiocanal (as it was rechristened in 2000 when it was combined with Canal Plus DA) and indeed for all of Canal Plus. What at the outset seemed like a potential golden age for the companies quickly turned into a nightmare and at various points it seemed like the company would join contemporaries such as PFE on the scrap heap. But survive it did and the company went on to consolidate and regroup to launch yet another attempt at entering the global marketplace in the late 2000s. This chapter will seek to detail these tumultuous seven years by first chronicling the larger events surrounding the company during the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of Vivendi Universal. The focus will then shift to Studiocanal’s attempts at engaging in international production throughout the period, including its continued dealings with Hollywood producers in the late 1990s, its partnership with London-based Working Title, and its support for Anglophone auteur cinema throughout the period. Finally, we will see in the aftermath of Vivendi Universal’s collapse the beginning of the company’s entry into the remake business, a strategic shift that would foreshadow its move into fully financing Anglophone projects in the late 2000s. All of this will take place against the backdrop of the company’s growing direct participation in the sales market, which in turn anticipates its second foray into international film distribution in 2006 when it acquired the UK’s Optimum Releasing and embarked upon the path that the rest of this book will be focused on.

The meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of VU Understanding Studiocanal’s fluctuating fortunes in the late 1990s and early 2000s begins not in Hollywood or at Canal Plus but instead at Compagnie

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Générale des Eaux, then France’s largest water and sewage utility. Plagued by financial irregularities and problems with its real estate holdings, the utility company sought new managerial blood when it appointed Jean-Marie Messier as its CEO in 1994. Besides being one of the country’s biggest utility companies, Générale des Eaux was also a major shareholder in Canal Plus. Starting off in the French Ministry of Finance, Messier later became an investment banker at the respected firm Lazard Frères where he had gained a reputation as a dynamic and innovative dealmaker (Johnson and Orange 2004, 26–29).1 At only thirty-seven years of age and lacking any substantive managerial experience, his appointment also represented a substantial risk for the venerable “old economy” company to take. High on the new CEO’s agenda was the rebranding of the company and diversifying it away from the water business and toward media and telephony, decisions that for some observers seemed motivated by Messier’s personal interests more than any normative managerial logic (34). The company was subsequently rebranded by Messier as Vivendi and he directed most of his attention to building positions in advertising agency Havas and telecoms company SFR and generally embracing the zeitgeist of the late 1990s which saw the inflation of a massive global bubble in telecom and media shares. To this end, Messier began by assuming complete control of Havas and then, having witnessed the world’s biggest corporate merger in the form of AOL-TimeWarner in the United States, decided that Vivendi needed to build a similar global, diversified media conglomerate. In simultaneous transactions in June of 2000, Vivendi agreed to acquire the 51 percent of Canal Plus it did not already own as well as all of Seagram’s Universal. The latter company was itself another unlikely collection of companies, including a drinks company which was ostensibly the core business when then CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. took over, as well as the Hollywood studio Universal and two record labels: MCA and Polygram. The combined company built by these transactions was christened Vivendi Universal and was publicly promoted as the realization of the dream of a vertically and horizontally integrated media conglomerate based in Europe, capable of competing with the American studios and their vastly diversified parent companies. A little over a year after these purchases, Vivendi Universal would buy USA Networks for $10 billion adding a number of US cable networks and film production companies to its holdings, while also buying a stake in satellite-television provider EchoStar Communications and all of Houghton Mifflin publishing.

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But this rapid accumulation of assets quickly became unwieldy and Vivendi Universal hemorrhaged cash as it struggled under the debt load it built up making all these acquisitions. Moreover, in the early 2000s the air began to come out of the internet bubble and Vivendi Universal’s stock price began to drop along with those of its peers, making borrowing more difficult for the company. Investor confidence was shaken by corporate scandals such as Enron and MCI Worldcom in the United States, as well as the inability of many companies such as AOL Time Warner to realize the profits that were promised to investors when the mega-merger between the firms was announced. These latter pains were particularly felt at Vivendi where little in the way of “synergy” between the various businesses Messier had collected at great cost were to be found. Finally, the internal management of the media companies was chaotic as clashes between personalities such as Barry Diller, the American studio boss who sold USA Networks to Vivendi and who was promised a leadership position within the company, and Canal Plus CEO Pierre Lescure and others led to the ouster of the Frenchman. Lescure’s sacking by Messier would in turn destabilize Canal Plus, a period in the company’s history to which this chapter will shortly return. Besides the clashes, there was simple uncertainty over the strategic roles of the various companies, unsurprising perhaps given the great deal of overlap between USA Films, Universal, and Studiocanal, but avoidable had management laid out a coherent vision for the combination of companies. None was forthcoming as the emphasis seemed instead to be on acquiring ever more assets. In July of 2002, just over two years to the day after the mergers with Canal Plus and Seagram’s, Messier was forced out as CEO of Vivendi Universal. Foremost among the priorities of the conglomerate’s new CEO Jean-René Fortou was to break up Vivendi Universal by selling off the US media assets. He eventually found a buyer for these in the form of US industrial conglomerate General Electric who were at the times owners of broadcast network NBC. The deal to sell the assets was announced in October of 2003 and they were promptly merged into NBCUniversal, in which Vivendi retained a 20 percent stake until 2009 when NBCUniversal was sold to Comcast. The blow to European media aspirations was enormous. Newspapers and trade publications ran the stories detailing the decline of the company’s fortunes and subsequent sale with headlines such as “Vivendi buries Hollywood Ambitions” (Screen International). The sale was then followed by several years of penury at the company that endangered all parts of the conglomerate, including Studiocanal.

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Rapid expansion under Vincent Grimond: Pan-European distribution, American production Unsurprisingly, Studiocanal and parent company Canal Plus were deeply affected by what transpired at the highest corporate levels, not only in the aftermath of the failure of Vivendi Universal, but also long before. To adequately depict what happened to the company during this period thus involves starting before the fateful merger and paying closer attention to events as they unfolded at Canal Plus. With Messier at the helm of Canal Plus’s biggest shareholder, Lescure worked with him to rapidly expand the company’s international holdings. Messier granted him permission to purchase Nethold, a pan-European satellite and pay-television network with operations in Italy, Scandanavia, and Belgium. This would prove to be a big mistake as the company, particularly its Italian division Telepiu lost great sums of money for many years after the purchase (Johnson and Orange 2004, 38). Lescure’s enthusiasm for expansion trickled down to Studiocanal as Canal Plus attempted to buy PFE’s international distribution network and producers Working Title Films in 1999 for $280 million, only to be rebuffed by Seagram’s (Dawtrey and Carver 1999). Undaunted, Studiocanal added four subsidiaries of its own (in the UK, Spain, France, and Germany) in just over seven months in 2000. Then CEO Vincent Grimond credited Lescure himself for insisting on the expansion (Dacbert 2000). Not done there, the company also went on to form a further distribution outlet in the form of a joint venture with broadcaster RAI in the Italian market in 2000 (Young 2000). In addition to these distribution deals, Studiocanal also signed a bevvy of production deals in the run-up to and immediately after the Vivendi Universal merger. With one significant exception, these were cofinancing pacts with Hollywood-based producers, very much along the same lines as the deal signed with Regency Pictures in the early 1990s. These deals included pacts with Warner Bros.’s-based Bel Air Pictures which was run by Arnon Milchan’s former partner at Regency, Steven Reuther; Phoenix Pictures which was run by former TriStar head Mike Medavoy; Artist Pictures Group a firm run by influential former agent Mike Ovitz; and an output agreement with Gary Barber and Robert Birnbaum’s Spyglass Entertainment. One further deal was signed with London-based producers Working Title who were actually a subsidiary of Universal Studios. This deal would prove so significant to Studiocanal’s long-term development that I discuss it separately below. All the deals involved Studiocanal investing

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in the respective companies’ projects in exchange for all French rights as well as all European television rights, to be managed through Canal Plus Image, as Canal Plus DA had been renamed. As such, the pacts resulted in a number of Hollywood films that Studiocanal had stakes in, including titles ranging from The Replacements (Howard Deutch, 2000) to The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shamayalan, 1999) (see Miller et al. 2001, 105, for further information on these deals). Others, such as that with APG did not result in any films being made and even ended in legal disputes over payments made to APG by Studiocanal (Brodesser 2002).

Studiocanal and Working Title Films The most significant production deal by some distance signed by Studiocanal at this time, however, was the pact signed with Working Title. Working Title was founded in 1984 by Tim Bevan and Sarah Radcliffe, who were at this point working in the nascent music video industry in London. Building on their relationships with directors and technicians in that industry, and forging financing deals with the newly established Channel 4 in Britain, which was making a name for itself as a financier of independent films, Working Title began making feature film projects. Throughout the 1980s they went on to make some of the most important British films of the decade including their debut feature My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985), its follow-up Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Stephen Frears, 1987), and the apartheid drama A World Apart (Chris Menges, 1988). Frustrated with the difficulties inherent in sourcing financing for independent production, the company sought a partnership with an international distributor who could finance and market their projects (Bevan 2016). They found such a partner in the early 1990s in the form of Polygram Filmed Entertainment which was then expanding its distribution network and looking for content partnerships. After a series of investments, PFE acquired the 51 percent of the company that it didn’t already own in 1992 in a move that also saw Radcliffe leave the company to be replaced by Eric Fellner. The result was a partnership that produced some of the most important films of the 1990s including Fargo, The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Coen 1997), and Elizabeth, as well as popular hits such as Bean and the previously discussed Four Weddings and a Funeral. With the sale of Polygram to Seagram’s in 1998, Working Title was one of the few assets to be retained by Edgar Bronfman Jr. and was transferred to Universal

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Studios. As Nathan Townsend details (2018a, 183), Working Title was the beneficiary of a co-financing deal between Universal and Studiocanal (then still known as LSC) to finance the development and production of Working Title’s projects. Under the terms of the initial five-year deal, LSC/Studiocanal paid half of Working Title’s operational costs in exchange for all continental European television rights to its projects as well as French theatrical and home video rights for half of its projects during the first three years of the deal. In the final two years of the deal, Studiocanal would receive all theatrical and video rights for continental Europe. Under this deal, the companies would collectively produce hit films such as Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001; see case study below), High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000), and Johnny English (Peter Howitt, 2003) among others. Working Title’s particular brand of often middlebrow filmmaking (Fellner has described their work as “intelligent popcorn” [executive Liza Chasin quoted in Townsend 2018b, 15]), combined with their always middle-budget productions and disproportionately international commercial appeal, would make them ideal partners for Studiocanal throughout their history from this point on. Whereas for Working Title, Studiocanal’s European orientation has been vital given the production company’s European sensibilities and working relationships (Bevan 2016). (These sensibilities and relationships, combined with its close working relationship with American talent and studios has led scholars to describe Working Title as a “transatlantic” or “mid-Atlantic” production company [e.g., Hochsherf and Legott 2010].) Given the degree to which their histories are thus intertwined, the development of the relationship between the two companies will be a recurring concern in the remainder of this book.

Case study: Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001) Working Title made a number of important and successful films under its first pact with Studiocanal and Universal, including the very first project made under the deal Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry, 2000) which received critical plaudits while grossing over $100 million at the international box office after being made for about $5 million (Townsend 2018a, 194). Other key works from this period would include Love, Actually (Richard Curtis, 2003) and Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004), each of which generated outsized commercial returns given their budgets and in various ways inhabited or redefined their respective genres. None,

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Figure 4 Bridget Jones’s Diary: Bridget (Renée Zellwegger) and Mark (Colin Firth) in the first of (so far) three happy endings.

however, matched the global commercial success or cultural staying power of Bridget Jones’s Diary, which besides its own critical and commercial success, gave rise to (so far) two sequels which, while not achieving the critical reception of the first film, have nonetheless continued to generate significant box office returns. As this trilogy of films stretches to the contemporary period—with Bridget Jones’s Baby being released in 2016 by Universal and Studiocanal—the original film in the series is the most ideal example of the ongoing importance of Working Title products to Studiocanal. Almost all of the details regarding the making of Bridget Jones’s Diary speak to the mid-Atlantic position of Working Title. As a company based in London, the producers had more awareness of Helen Fielding’s columns for the British newspaper The Independent than an American production company would have had. Upon hearing that the columns would be made into a book, the company not only had geography on its side—being in London and with easier access to its publishers—but it also had the financial resources via its backing from PFE at the time to outbid rival producers for the rights to what would become a best-seller. Its resources under its deals with Universal and Studiocanal also ensured it would be able to cast Hollywood and British stars in the lead roles, even if the casting of American star Renée Zellweger in the role of Bridget was controversial. (Zellweger, though not yet of the superstar status of actresses such as Julia Roberts, was nonetheless a very in-demand star due to her breakout turn

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in Jerry Maguire [Cameron Crowe, 1996] [Eric Fellner, quoted in De Winter 2006, 103].)The company utilized its relationships with star Hugh Grant and screenwriter Richard Curtis (who coauthored the script with Fielding and Andrew Davies) to work on the film, each of whom had been instrumental in the success of previous Working Title romcoms Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. But the company also had the creative autonomy to take such risks as bringing in Sharon Maguire, who had yet to make a feature at this point in her career, to direct the film. The combination of material and talent brought together by Working Title made Bridget Jones’s Diary one of its most typical and successful transatlantic romantic comedies. Though she does not discuss the film in her article on this subgenre, the film does engage with many of what Annabelle Honess Roe (2009) and others describe as the central tenets of the subgenre. The casting of the central love triangle features an American star in Zellweger and two British stars in Grant and Colin Firth, even though the characters themselves are all British. Nevertheless, the cultural clash between America and Britain, what Tobias Hochsherf and James Leggott (2010, 12) have described as the central plot device of Richard Curtis’s screenplays for Working Title, is very much present in the film, with Grant’s Daniel Cleaver character choosing his American fiancée over Bridget and Firth’s Darcy nearly deciding to leave London to relocate to New York City near the end of the film. Happily for the audience and Bridget, Darcy decides to stay in London, making for another sentimental victory for Britain in these films, matched by corresponding victories in Notting Hill, Four Weddings, and Love Actually. These elements, combined with the comic writing and memorable performance of Zellweger as the flawed but lovable Bridget helped to make the film popular among critics and audiences, generating over $200 million in box office receipts globally and spawning a sequel in 2004’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, a film which also grossed over $200 million. Tellingly for Working Title’s trajectory under Universal, this was the first sequel produced by the company and many others would follow as the producers became accustomed to working in the franchise mode. With the production of Bridget Jones’s Baby in 2016 without Hugh Grant or Curtis being involved, the franchise produced yet another gross over $200 million internationally despite a tepid response in the US market (where it grossed only $24 million, the lowest return of any of the films in the franchise thus far). Given the increasing clout of the international market for films, it is perhaps not surprising that there has been talk of a fourth installment

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of the series—and indeed the third film’s plot did leave an opening for such a film in the unresolved question of Daniel Cleaver’s fate following a mysterious plane crash—and perhaps even more films as Helen Fielding continues to contemplate literary sequels to Bridget Jones’s story (Denham 2016). For Studiocanal, Bridget Jones’s Diary was the first in a long line of attempts at utilizing the transatlantic romcom formula. Its success was felt in the French and European markets, as was also seen with the sequels, with the third installment generating $24 million in box office receipts in France and Germany, the firm’s two direct distribution markets on that release. (The financing and distribution deals for the films have evolved with the changes in the management and strategic orientation at Studiocanal and Miramax over the fifteen years that the franchise has been running.) It is thus not surprising that Studiocanal would return to this formula on multiple occasions, including during the 1999–2006 period in the forms of Working Title’s Love Actually and Wimbledon (Richard Loncraine, 200) as well as Leap Year (Anand Tucker, 2010), produced with Spyglass, which was a sort of Irish variation on the subgenre starring Matthew Goode and Amy Adams as the transatlantic couple. Once Studiocanal moved into fully financing and directly distributing its products in the late 2000s, it yet again returned to the formula with Working Title’s I Give It a Year (Dan Mazer, 2012), Man Up (Ben Palmer, 2015) starring Simon Pegg and Lake Bell, produced by Big Talk Pictures, who also made Cuban Fury (James Griffith, 2014) starring Nick Frost and Rashida Jones for Studiocanal. Except for Love Actually and the Bridget Jones sequels, however, these attempts at reprising the formula have not been successful, with most of the films instead making for conspicuous critical and commercial failures. Whatever the fate of its work with this particular formula, Studiocanal has however continued to work with Working Title in a relationship that has fundamentally shaped the company’s development as a global studio, as will be seen in subsequent chapters.

Auteur production in the 2000s In addition to its commitments to the slates of various production companies, Studiocanal during this period also began making deals with American and European filmmakers working in English on a one-off basis. Most of these deals were with recognized arthouse auteurs, the foremost of which was David Lynch. In a move that foreshadowed its strategic turn in the late 2000s, LSC in 1999

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agreed to fully finance Lynch’s film The Straight Story for a reported $10 million. The company quickly turned this into a profit by preselling distribution rights to the film for over a reported $15 million at the American Film Market that year (Williams 1999). The Straight Story occupies a particular place in Lynch’s oeuvre, being one of the director’s most accessible films in terms of narration and character development as well as a departure for the director when it came to tone and content. The film was after all a G-rated film earnestly and melodramatically detailing an elderly man’s attempts to reconcile with his estranged brother. As he journeys to meet his brother, riding on his lawnmower, despite the long distance, the man meets an array of troubled characters to whom he dispenses curative wisdom. Given such a sentimental plot combined with a very straightforward approach to style and narration, it is impossible to consider The Straight Story art cinema as such, but it was nonetheless sold strongly on the Lynch brand, with the departures from the typical Lynch film having acted as marketing hooks of sorts. Mulholland Drive would prove to be a different case altogether. Originally sold to the ABC television network as a pilot for a series in the vein of Lynch’s famous Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–91), the pilot was rejected by the network and laid dormant until Studiocanal’s then production chief Alain Sarde and producer Pierre Edelman offered to revive the project as a feature. Lynch agreed and Studiocanal bought the pilot from ABC and injected a further $7 million in making the project over (Anolik 2017). The end result was a great critical success as Lynch was corecipient of the Best Director award at Cannes and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Director. Moreover, critics have come to see as one of the best works of the director’s oeuvre and indeed one of the most important films generally of the 2000s. Studiocanal’s other auteur and arthouse investments during this period were surprisingly varied in terms of their national origins. Projects from the period included American independent productions such as Raising Victor Vargas (Peter Sollett, 2002) and Bully (Larry Clark, 2001); European films made in English (Intimacy [Patrice Chéreau, 2001]); Italian (The Son’s Room [Nanni Moretti, 2001]); and Spanish (Sex and Lucia [Julio Medem, 2001]); Asian films such as Kandahar (Mohsen Makmalbaf, 2001) and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Sljie Dai, 2002); and the low-budget British feature Young Adam (David Mackenzie, 2003). The sheer volume and variety of these films speaks to the degree of the company’s international arthouse ambitions during this period and titles such as these and some of the more high-profile French films the

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company produced during the period (such as Irreversible [Gaspar Noé, 2002]) generated a great deal of critical prestige for the company. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, with few exceptions (such as The Pianist [Roman Polanski, 2002]), they did not generate a great deal of box office receipts in France or across the company’s new distribution network and as we will see, the company would move steadily away from the purely arthouse film toward more middlebrow fare, works more akin for example to those produced by Working Title, in the contemporary period.

Case study: The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002) With seven Academy Award nominations and three wins, for Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as the Palme D’Or from the Cannes Film Festival, The Pianist remains to this day one of the most acclaimed films that Studiocanal has been involved with. It also was a considerable commercial achievement, first by virtue of its complex financing package which stitched together a $35 million budget from various sources, some of which came from Studiocanal’s sister companies in the Vivendi Universal conglomerate, but some of which came from outside partners. Second, despite its tough subject matter and controversial auteur director, the film managed an impressive box office return of over $120 million globally. For all these reasons and more, The Pianist is an ideal case study for understanding Studiocanal’s auteur cinema activities during the Vivendi Universal period and immediately after. Not only does the film demonstrate artistic strategies that foreshadow the auteur cinema strategies the company employs in the contemporary period, but the film is also a rare example of the synergies so desperately sought by Messier in the Vivendi Universal gambit actually having been realized. Studiocanal came on board The Pianist very early in the production process, helping Polanski to acquire the rights to Wladyislaw Szpilman’s memoirs and paying for the development of the script (Williams 2000). As the project developed from this point, its financing structure at first glance resembled many of the complex patchworks of companies that are typical of European co-production. Besides Studiocanal, financing partners included Bac Films in France, Studio Babelsberg in Germany, Canal Plus in France and Poland as well as Planeta in Spain, among others including numerous subsidy bodies in Poland and Germany. Closer examination shows how much the broader Vivendi

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Universal family of companies came together to support the Studiocanal-sold project. These include Canal Plus, Bac (Studiocanal’s long-standing partner for French distribution), and Studio Babelsberg which VUE owned at the time. Moreover, the film ended up being distributed in the all-important US market by Universal subsidiary Focus Features, the studio’s prestige distribution label. The fraught issue of which parts of the conglomerate were to handle which films was in this case at least brought to a clear and satisfactory conclusion: Studiocanal acquired the European product, oversaw its European releases and passed it on to the prestige North American brand for exploitation there and (successful) awards lobbying. Ironically, this successful synergy of the various film and television companies was largely realized in 2003 as the conglomerate itself was being broken up. This would seldom happen during the Vivendi Universal years, but the film could only have been made and distributed in the way that it was by VU-era Studiocanal for a number of reasons, including those relating to Polanksi himself. Long one of the most admired of international auteurs, he was also a pariah in the United States due to his status as a fugitive from justice there. The famed director of classics of the “New Hollywood” cinema such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1976) was (and still is) wanted in California on charges of statutory rape in connection with a thirteen-year-old victim. Polanski’s subsequent flight from these charges made his entry into the United States impossible and made working directly with the director politically difficult for US studios. Studiocanal’s involvement in this project and the subsequent links to the marketing and distribution machinery of Universal Studios can thus be seen as something of an end run around this problem, giving Polanski the freedom and resources to make what was after all an expensive film for the arthouse market of the time, as well as access to the US marketplace where such costs could be partially recouped. Polanski’s film embodies many of the key traits of European auteur cinema that make it distinctive from genre cinema and therefore often unappealing to Hollywood studios. The subject matter was very personal to Polanski himself who barely survived the Holocaust as a youth in Krakow and who saw his mother die at Auschwitz. The subject matter is also of course very dark and distressing, made all the more so by the film’s insistence on vividly and graphically displaying many Nazi atrocities. We see for instance multiple children’s deaths from violence, starvation, and other causes; these include a scene in which Wladyislaw (Adrien Brody) pushes a wheel barrow seemingly full of dead children down a

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street in the Warsaw ghetto as part of his bid to escape from his captors. Other memorably horrible scenes include the perfunctory dumping of an old man out of a wheel chair from his home’s balcony by Nazi soldiers; a pile of bodies being burned after the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943; and so on. One can easily sympathize with Peter Bradshaw’s review of the film for The Guardian when he called it “unwatchably harrowing” (2003). Beyond its tone and representational qualities, other anti-commercial elements included the film’s approach to character. As The New York Times critic A.  O. Scott points out, Adrien Brody’s Wladyislaw is not heroic, nor even is he always sympathetic; instead he often seems aloof and self-assured (2002). Moreover, he doesn’t find redemption and transcendence at the end of the film, instead the film jumps from his discovery by Polish troops among the ruins of Warsaw to his return to the Radio Poland studio. Such a trajectory can be contrasted with those of other central characters in more conventional heroic treatments of Holocaust film history such as Liam Neeson’s Oskar Schindler or Roberto Benigni’s Guido in Life is Beautiful. If for some the film had certain arthouse tendencies when it came to tone and character, for others the film was also too safe and conservative for the expectations that greet auteur films. When it was announced as the winner of the Palme D’Or, some members of the audience booed the selection as it was thought that it was too “safe and middle-ground” in terms of narration and style to win a competition that included more experimental works such as Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) and Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002) (McCarthy 2002a). Echoing this sentiment, Variety critic Todd McCarthy led his review of the film off by pointing out that the film was “remarkably conventional” (2002b). Besides these elements, the film is also a biopic of an actual survivor of the Holocaust, making it an example of a genre that is famously, if not notoriously, middlebrow in terms of its aesthetic qualities and cultural positioning. Middlebrow auteur cinema would come to be one of the most important forms of film and television production for Studiocanal, but none of the works made in the contemporary period can match The Pianist for either critical or commercial impact. Even if the company would return to this archetype throughout the rest of its history as a studio, Polanski’s film still has a darker edge than almost all of Studiocanal’s later auteur films and therefore speaks to the ways in which the company’s conception of auteur cinema would grow ever more middlebrow as time has passed. Only two of David Lynch’s films among the Studiocanal auteur output of the period (Mulholland Drive [2003] and Inland Empire [2006]) can really

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lay claim to being more divorced from commercial concerns than The Pianist, but then Lynch’s excesses on Inland Empire, as we will see, may well have been the proverbial straw that broke the studio’s back and ensured they would focus instead on safer, more artistically conservative auteur fare from that point onward.

The turmoil of the Vivendi Universal years: Lescure and/against Americanization Having examined some of the key production maneuvers of LSC/Studiocanal during this period, we can now return to the fates of Canal Plus and Studiocanal under Vivendi Universal. Once the Vivendi Universal deal became a reality, both Studiocanal and Canal Plus would be plunged into uncertainty. Integrating all the companies in the new conglomerate involved would prove very difficult, a difficulty that was greatly exacerbated by a lack of guidance or vision from Vivendi itself and the continuous addition of new assets. This can be seen for instance in the experience of Canal Plus chief Pierre Lescure during this period. Lescure was one of the cofounders of Canal Plus in 1984 and was considered one of Messier’s closest allies at Vivendi during the run-up to the buyout of the paytelevision network and the merger with Seagram’s. Once the dual mergers took place, Lescure was made head of all Film and Television activities at Vivendi Universal. But the exact details regarding the management structure were left vague by Messier and Vivendi vice-chair Edgar Bronfman Jr. who assured Universal employees that “no little Frenchies are going to run a Hollywood studio” (quoted in Kilday 2000). Lescure was thus assigned to stay in Paris and away from day-to-day affairs at Universal even though he was putatively in charge of all Vivendi’s film and television operations. As losses mounted at Canal Plus, pressure mounted on Lescure and newly promoted Canal Plus chief Denis Olivennes and the pair suggested selling some of its international networks, particularly the troublesome Telepiu but Messier refused (Johnson and Orange 2004, 183). Moreover, Messier and others within Vivendi Universal were unhappy with Lescure’s inability to articulate a joint strategy for Universal and Canal Plus. Senior VU executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. was particularly blunt in assessing VU’s perception of the French executive’s shortcomings in managing the American parts of the conglomerate’s businesses, saying later: “[Lescure] didn’t know his ass from his elbow when it came to the US” (quoted in Johnson and Orange 2004, 122).

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Tensions between Messier and Lescure were thus already present when Vivendi Universal announced the acquisition of USA Networks in December of 2001, a deal which also included the hiring of USA Networks chief Barry Diller. Diller, formerly the head of Hollywood studios Paramount and Fox, made it clear he would report only to Messier himself and the Frenchman agreed to appoint him as head of all Film and Television activities. This was nothing less than a demotion of Lescure and the Canal Plus cofounder was said to have been insulted and outraged, but Messier insisted that a Hollywood insider was the ideal candidate to lead the conglomerate’s media business (Johnson and Orange 2004, 185). Tensions between Messier and Lescure continued to mount until Messier dramatically fired Lescure in April of 2002, prompting vehement protests from many in the French media industry including executives at Studiocanal. Lescure for his part took to French radio to protest the decision—even going so far as to encourage Canal Plus customers to cancel their subscriptions. Legal actions followed and the mood around Vivendi Universal became dark and fractious. For many observers, this situation lent credence to the worst fears of American ambitions leading the French company to lose its way. Lescure was seen as the heart and soul of Canal Plus and even an icon to the French film industry. Messier for his part was seen as having been seduced by the glamour of Hollywood and America generally, symbolized by his plan at the time to move his personal residence to New York City.

Studiocanal during the Vivendi Universal upheaval and aftermath The impact of this tumult at Studiocanal was keenly felt. Before the sacking of Lescure, things were already unclear when it came to the company’s place in the larger Vivendi Universal. Given their overlap in terms of international ambition, Universal and Studiocanal were arguably at cross purposes as Universal’s international arm competed in European markets and Studiocanal also financed American-made films. Although then CEO Vincent Grimond insisted at the time of the merger that Studiocanal would pursue its own agenda independent of Universal’s ambitions (Frater 2000), this was contradicted by how events transpired. To begin with, Grimond himself left Studiocanal in the early days of Vivendi Universal to work under Universal chief Ron Meyer (James 2001). Canal Plus then undertook a realignment in which Studiocanal

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was assigned to handle more European-themed fare whereas Hollywood products were delegated to Universal. One part of this realignment consisted of Studiocanal curtailing its co-financing activities with Hollywood partners, with the exception of Working Title which was after all a co-venture with its new sister company (James 2001). Once Lescure was ousted by Messier, Studiocanal executives Brahim Chioua, and Roger Leonormand spoke openly about their dismay (James 2001). Unrest at the company would only grow as Messier himself was forced out of Vivendi Universal in July of 2002. Jean-Renée Fortou, new CEO of the conglomerate, began his tenure by immediately ordering cost cuts and audits. Disenchanted with life at Vivendi Universal before and after Messier’s departure, Chioua, Grimond, and fellow executive Vincent Maraval left Studiocanal in September of 2002 to found Exception, later to be renamed Wild Bunch—heretofore a branch of the company’s sales division specializing in low-budget arthouse fare—as an independent entity to finance, distribute, and sell films on the international market. This effectively created a long-term rival to Studiocanal that has now grown into an integrated sales, distribution, and production company. Their departure from the company also perhaps helps to explain the subsequent steady march away from auteur fare toward the middlebrow and popular genre fare. More changes were wrung in rapid succession as Bac Films ceased to be the company’s French distribution partner and was replaced with in-house company Mars Films in October of 2002. German distribution subsidiary Tobis bought out Studiocanal in November of 2002, ending the company’s distribution presence in that key European market. By January of 2003, Studiocanal was described in the trade press as “heading towards total meltdown” and ultimately lost about 15 percent of its workforce (Tartaglione 2003a). During this time, efforts were actually made by Vivendi and Canal Plus to sell Studiocanal outright, even for a nominal fee of €1 if need be, but no interest was found in the marketplace, saving the company for the time being (Darmon 2015a). During this period, the international distribution machinery built up so rapidly was dissembled with equal haste. Roger Leonormand was at this point replaced as CEO by Frederic Sichler, who would revamp the executive management of the company and cut its direct support of French producers Alain Sarde, Richard Granpierre, and Alain Goldman in favor of one-off financing deals (Tartaglione 2003b). Sichler also indicated publicly that the company would be performing something of a retreat from its international ambitions, focusing instead on French-language genre and middlebrow fare, with the

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occasional foray into international production, arguing that such a production philosophy would better assist Canal Plus’s drive for more subscribers in France (James 2004). This focus, along with the efforts of Mars Films, the new in-house distribution label would indeed make for a number of important local hits for the company during this period, including Crimson Rivers 2 (Olivier Dahan, 2004) (two million admissions), Podium (Yann Moix, 2004) (3.5 million admissions), and Days of Glory (Rachid Bouchareb, 2006) (three million).

International production 2004–06 Despite Sichler’s rhetoric about focusing on local success and a number of hit films to its credit during the period, the company never completely stopped its international production activity. Cost cutting and the disbanding of its international distribution network led the company to revise the terms of its production deal with Working Title in 2004. Now instead of providing half of the producers’ overheads, Studiocanal agreed to pay a reported 25 percent and instead of receiving European rights to the films, the company only received French rights (Dawtrey 2006). Working Title for its part continued to consistently produce well-performing mainly middlebrow fare throughout the term of the deal, including Pride and Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005), United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006), and Mr. Bean’s Holiday (Steve Bendelack, 2007). Due to production delays and other factors such as sequels made to films originally financed under the deals with Studiocanal, this pact continued to generate films for Studiocanal up until at least 2016 which saw the third installment of the Bridget Jones franchise. But the deal itself would end in 2012 when Working Title entered into a new arrangement with Universal, by which time Studiocanal was already financing at least one Working Title feature outside of the pact with Universal. As will be seen in the next chapter this, somewhat paradoxically, would thus lead to an even deeper relationship between Studiocanal and the producers. Besides the Working Title pact, Studiocanal also carried on supporting other projects from international filmmakers during the post-Vivendi University/preintegrated Studiocanal years. Projects were developed with the likes of Martin Scorsese (James 2004) and Clint Eastwood, with the company taking French rights on the latter’s runaway hit Million Dollar Baby (2004). The company also played a similar role in the Spyglass/DreamWorks project Memoirs of a Geisha

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(Rob Marshall, 2006). But perhaps the most interesting and influential film for Studiocanal’s production philosophy going forward was its third collaboration with David Lynch on what would prove to be Lynch’s final feature, Inland Empire (2006). Studiocanal took all world rights on the project in 2005, up to which point Lynch had been self-financing two years of principal photography on the film (Dawtrey 2005). Lynch carried on shooting for another year and in the end premiered a three hour final cut of the film at Venice in the autumn of 2006. Unable to find a US buyer for the film, which distributors found difficult to understand (even for a Lynch film) and to market to exhibitors given the running time, Studiocanal attempted to pressure Lynch into cutting down the length of the film, something which the auteur Lynch refused to do. Studiocanal then went so far as to withdraw the film from the Sitges Film Festival in Spain, where Lynch was due to receive an award that year to mark the twentieth anniversary of the release of Blue Velvet. The reason for this withdrawal was reported to be that the French company did not want the film to be received well lest it strengthened the filmmaker’s resolve not to cut its running time (Hopewell and Mayorga 2006). In the end, Lynch himself bought back the US distribution rights and the film was released to tepid reviews and very poor box office numbers. The final US gross was under $1 million and the film grossed a total of $4 million globally, compared to $20 million for Mulholland Drive. This misadventure in auteur cinema would prove to be the last purely art cinema film in English that Studiocanal would finance up to the time of writing; from now on the emphasis would be on more middlebrow and generic fare.

Emerging from the crisis: Remakes as a stepping stone to returning to international production Besides these production activities, Sichler turned his attention to attempting to wring greater value out of the company’s library by means of selling the remake rights to its films. In one particular article in trade publication Le Film Franҫais in 2006 that reads more like an advertisement than a journalistic article, Sichler not only listed a number of titles that the company had successfully licensed for remaking (including The Fog [Rupert Wainwright, 2005], The Ladykillers [Joel and Ethan Coen, 2004], and others), but also detailed the fees the company expected to receive for options on its titles (Drouhaud 2006). But remaking titles from the library would not be just a revenue-generating activity for

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the company. Instead it foreshadowed yet another return to international production and distribution. This will be detailed in the next chapter, but for now we can at least see the clues to the bigger strategies at the company in the executive featured alongside Sichler: Ronald Halpern, then head of remakes at the company. In the following year, Halpern would be made vice-president in charge of International Production and the first successful project he would oversee would be Chloe (Atom Egoyan, 2009) a remake of library title Nathalie… (Anne Fontaine, 2003). Though Chloe would not be released until 2009, the bigger strategic initiative it was part of began to take shape in 2006 at the end of the years of penury caused by the Vivendi Universal. The first shot across the bow in this initiative took the form of the acquisition of UK distributor Optimum Releasing in 2006, a move that signaled Studiocanal’s intentions once again to become a global studio.

Postscript: Vivendi Universal and integrated European studios Before chronicling the new global strategies that would be employed at Studiocanal in the late 2000s, it is important that we take a moment to ponder the historical implications of Vivendi Universal in relation to the global ambitions for European studios. This is important for its own sake as well as for understanding what makes the contemporary period so interesting in light of the historical contexts that this book is concerned in part with illuminating. We can begin this discussion with Buchsbaum’s assessment that Vivendi Universal under Messier represented “the nightmarish realization” of the hope for an integrated European studio (2017, 192). Implicit in such a conception is larger critical view that European studio building is a futile exercise always doomed to failure and moreover a systemic risk to the industrial ecology of European nations. This belief is seemingly borne out by the historical chronology offered in Chapter 1, but despite the failures that undoubtedly mark the history of European studios, we must continue to look closely at the causes of those failures to attempt to assess whether success can indeed ever be a possibility. While Vivendi Universal was clearly a traumatic moment for the European film and television industries, it is crucial that we assess precisely what went wrong. We can begin with the company’s business plan and strategic objectives, which actually were not as flawed as the calamitous fate of the company may

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suggest. Certainly, combining a water company with a media company was an absurd idea, but beyond that the synergizing of media content and distribution mechanisms was not. Vivendi Universal and its fellow traveler AOL Time Warner may have gotten this strategy spectacularly wrong, but Comcast, who went on to buy NBCUniversal has so far gotten it right, as have Disney and the later incarnation of Time Warner, each of which have successfully integrated their cable and broadcast holdings with their film and television studios and other entertainment assets. Other companies such as Netflix and Amazon are likewise currently effectively implementing these principles. That Vivendi Universal erred cannot be blamed on the strategy, but instead on the poor execution of that strategy, which took the form of overpaying for many assets, accumulating them too quickly and doing it all at the wrong moment in history. These facts were combined with the failure on the part of VU management to properly manage those assets once they were acquired, a complaint that Bronfman himself made about the company (quoted in Johnson and Orange, 159). We can thus only reject the ideal of a European studio on the evidence of Vivendi Universal if we also accept the idea that poor managerial ability, evinced here in spectacular fashion by Messier, is inherent in European people and corporations, a claim I am sure no one would want actually want to make. (Even if it were to be argued, such a view would hardly explain the numerous other collapses of “synergy” oriented American media companies during the dot.com bubble of the early 2000s, all of which were equally attributable to inept and/or corrupt managers and inflated asset prices.) Another way to view the VU debacle and its relevance to film history is in relation to that thorny question of the relationship between Europe and Hollywood. Maybe the problem in the design of the company was that it involved another attempt by a European company to conquer the American market, this time by acquiring a Hollywood studio. For attempting such a feat, and subsequently failing miserably, VU can be compared to David Puttnam’s attempt to lead Columbia in the 1980s, a similarly short-lived and unhappy experience. VU, like Puttnam and like many other foreign companies including Matsushita and Sony, and more recently like China’s Wanda Group, came to Hollywood and attempted to harness its power over the global media market, experienced difficulties and like the corporations listed here lost great sums of money. Sometimes this has seemed to be a case of finding an untrustworthy or unreliable business partner and this latter category aptly sums up LSC’s relationship with Carolco. Studiocanal did not fare substantially better in its dealings under

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Vivendi Universal. The company would later, after the expiration of the deals to support Working Title, including during the Vivendi Universal era, audit the partnership only to find what it claimed were instances of outright deception and fraud by Universal, many of which took place even when the companies were supposed to be equals within the same conglomerate (Johnson 2013). The suit was later settled without details being disclosed, but the implications are clearly that the Hollywood company once again used its superior knowledge of the film industry to take advantage of its naïve foreign partner. This is perhaps the more important lesson of the VU mess: that building a globally competitive studio will have to necessarily keep the Hollywood majors at some kind of remove from the daily operations (and financial resources) of a would-be European studio. The next chapter will examine Studiocanal’s attempts to execute such a strategy, to build a studio that could keep the majors at arm’s length.

4

Once More into the Breach: International Expansion, 2006 Onwards

The acquisition of Optimum Releasing in the UK in 2006 marked a great turning point in the history of Studiocanal as this move into international distribution was quickly complemented with the beginnings of internationally oriented production and further growth of the distribution network. In the short term, the Optimum buy gave Studiocanal exposure to the world’s then second biggest market for theatrical, television, and home video distribution. With this direct market access, the company now had the scale it needed to reenter the world of Anglophone film finance with a new strategic aim: fully financing or co-financing productions in exchange for copyright ownership and sales and multi-territory distribution rights, a model that then general counsel, soonto-be CEO Olivier Courson told the Cahiers du cinema was explicitly modeled on the American studios (Frodon 2006, 13). As we have seen, its earlier attempts at international production, with some exceptions such as David Lynch’s films, the company only held equity shares in its productions and limited distribution rights, usually television licensing in the European market. Such a strategic shift spoke to Studiocanal’s ambition to be a true international player with control of the marketing of its intellectual property rather than trusting a Hollywood partner to control and exploit these assets. The initial film made with such plans in mind was Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-Wai’s first English-language feature, My Blueberry Nights (2007), which Studiocanal distributed in the UK and France and for which the company managed international sales to other territories. The film would prove something of a commercial disappointment (grossing $22 million worldwide and only $3.9 million in Studiocanal’s distribution territories) as well as a critical one, but it was nevertheless the beginning of a new direction at Studiocanal. The company would not engage in this kind of production again until Atom Egoyan’s Chloe in

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2009, but by that time there would be several projects in development and an even bigger distribution network in place. To make the next move in terms of expanding its territorial coverage, Studiocanal acquired German distributor Kinowelt in 2008. This move gave the company access to another large theatrical market as well as the world’s largest television and home video market outside of America, one that is highly receptive to Anglophone content and stars (Jackel 2003, 120). In the run-up to this acquisition Olivier Courson replaced Frederic Sichler as managing director of the company. With three major European territories in place, Studiocanal now further escalated its production activities. This began in earnest with Atom Egoyan’s Chloe in 2009 and continued with two such films in 2010, and between six and ten internationally oriented films annually from 2011 onward. Films from this period included fully financed hits such as The Last Exorcism (Daniel Stamm, 2010), coproductions like The Tourist (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2010), and a range of disappointments of both kinds including Deadfall (Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2012) and Serena (Susanne Bier, 2014), both coproductions with the American firm 2929. The company also shifted from making equity investments in Working Title’s films to fully financing projects that Universal had declined to make, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Legend (Brian Helgeland, 2015). It also developed a working relationship with experienced Hollywood genre film producer Joel Silver, cooperatively or fully financing a number of his projects in exchange for distribution rights at a time when Silver was struggling to secure funding from longtime patron Warner Bros. Initially this meant limited investments in films made under his Dark Castle production label, investments that brought with them French distribution rights. This would evolve into deals in which Studiocanal would fully finance his works. Films made in this way would include two of Studiocanal’s biggest hits to date: Unknown (Jaume ColletSerra, 2011) and Non-Stop (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2014). Such output, along with a number of one-off projects with producers such as David Heyman (Paddington) came in addition to the company’s local production output in France and Germany, output Studiocanal typically only distributed in those markets. During this time, the company also added a distributor in Australia and New Zealand, with the acquisition of Hoyts in 2012. While this may seem like a departure from Studiocanal’s European emphasis, it is better understood as strengthening its British orientation. Australia and New Zealand have long been healthy markets for British-themed fare (O’Regan 1996, 78). Indeed, the

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company reportedly took notice of the territory’s potential after impressive box office returns for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Wiseman 2012). Another motivating factor for the Hoyts acquisition was more straightforward. Despite a relatively small population (approximately 25 million people across the two countries, compared to 64 million in the UK, 66 million in France, and 81 million in Germany), Australia alone is still one of the top ten box office territories in the world, with total takings of US$1.2 billion in 2012, the year that Studiocanal made the acquisition (Ulin 2014, 194). Studiocanal’s expansion into key global distribution territories also is notable for its lack of a direct link to the United States, the single biggest market for film and television in the world. Instead of marketing its products directly to US retailers—be it via subsidiaries, joint ventures, or output agreements—the company decided to rely on sales to US-based distribution firms. This contradicts conventional wisdom on film marketing (and many previous strategic decisions at the company itself), as distributors realize more profit from a film’s success in a given market than virtually any other segment of the industry. Additionally this might have seemed like a mistake in retrospect as there have been several occasions on which Studiocanal films have struggled to find US distribution, with 2015 seeing limited or no theatrical runs for releases such as Legend, Macbeth (Justin Kurzel), The Program (Stephen Frears), and Man Up. The company experienced similar difficulties with films such as Serena and Shaun the Sheep Movie (Richard Starzak and Mark Burton), despite the latter’s rave critical reviews and successful international box office run, only finding a US partner months after the film’s global release. Besides departing from tradition at Studiocanal, Canal Plus, and Vivendi, where as previous chapters have shown, chasing the US market was a goal, this is also a decision with historical implications. As was detailed in Chapter 1, most of Studiocanal’s European predecessors established US subsidiaries to handle North American distribution at some point and these efforts have universally ended in disappointment if not flat out catastrophe. Given the collective track records of European companies’ efforts to develop their own US distribution divisions, along with Studiocanal’s own volatile history as detailed in previous chapters, it seems logical that the company would prefer to sell its works to US distributors rather than venture out on its own. Such relative independence at least gives the company the ability to move between partners and, in the best cases, to use competition between them to their own advantage. More importantly, it allows the firm to avoid the losses that come from failures in the

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US market, where marketing costs are so much higher, proportionally, than in Europe (Darmon 2015a). In other words, this strategy may make Studiocanal less bold or ambitious than some of its predecessors, but it may also mean that the company is more sustainable in the long run. But this is no historical accident nor is it necessarily a sign of strategic genius at Studiocanal. The fact that the company can function successfully without direct access to the American market is symptomatic of the bigger shift in the global film and television industries discussed in Chapter 1. This shift, it should be reiterated, has seen the revenue available from “international” territories—by which the industry (and scholarship) means every nation in the world except the United States and Canada—outstrip revenue available from the North American market. Indeed, international box office revenues routinely have doubled those of the American market, with the latest statistics showing that in 2016, the United States and Canada constitute less than 30 percent of the world box office (Lang 2017). Theatrical box office is of course a relatively small part of the overall revenue for films, with home video of various types (including television broadcast, DVD sales, and streaming rights) constituting the lion’s share of a film’s revenues. Yet international markets have proven crucial to ancillary revenue as well, with European markets becoming particularly important. Trade press figures from 2014 indicate that the European market constituted 65 percent of the international revenue for Hollywood films when calculations included television and other ancillary deals, whereas emerging markets including China tend to generate relatively less income beyond theatrical releases due to rampant piracy (Tartaglione 2014). This larger phenomenon is responsible in recent years for a number of what I call inverted hits: films that are disproportionately successful in international markets relative to the North American market. Such films have become commonplace in recent years and Studiocanal, for its part, has been involved in a number of inverted hits, including The Tourist. The film was panned by critics in the United States and considered a box office failure there, making only $67 million on a reported budget of $100 million. International success came to the rescue, however, as the film ended up with an international gross of $280 million, including $28 million from the three territories controlled by Studiocanal at the time. The Tourist was at the time of its release the most successful film within the company’s distribution network and remains the most globally popular of Studiocanal’s oeuvre to date. Another inverted hit was Shaun the Sheep Movie, which earned less than $20 million in the United States

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but made over $100 million internationally and $45.4 million in Studiocanal territories (making it the firm’s third biggest hit within its networks to date). Similarly, the British comedy I Give It a Year, the acquisition Robocop (Jose Padilha, 2014), and the animated film Thunder and the House of Magic (Jeremy Degruson and Ben Stassen, 2013) garnered significant grosses despite their lack of box office traction in the United States.

Tier 2 filmmaking and Studiocanal’s opportunism Another important change in the macroeconomic media environment has meant less competition in production for Studiocanal and its peers. As a number of commentators have noted (e.g., Balio 2013, 149) in recent years Hollywood majors have increasingly placed their bets on a smaller and smaller number of higher- and higher-budgeted films, effectively concentrating their energies exclusively on big-budget “tent pole” films with franchise potential. This has meant that the majors’ films routinely have nine-figure production budgets as well as enormous marketing costs. Such concentration at the highest end of the production spectrum has left openings in low- and medium-budget filmmaking. These segments of the market, which—following Perren and adjusting her figures for inflation, I will refer to as tier 2 (budgets under US$60 million) and tier 3 (generally speaking under US$5 million for contemporary films) filmmaking (2012, 154)1—have since the early 1990s become the domains of the specialty divisions of the majors (e.g., Focus Features, Fox Searchlight), as well as US-based “mini-majors” like Lionsgate. These tiers have become more accessible since 2008 as the majors largely (but not completely) deserted the space after the financial crisis, which resulted in many specialty divisions being shuttered or scaled back and production resources redirected toward tent poles. It is this niche that the most successful European companies have targeted, with the biggest budgets for works fully financed by the respective companies seldom coming in over $50 million.2 As can be seen in Table 1, Studiocanal has worked in this budget range extensively during this period. This shift in the marketplace has created new opportunities for this iteration of Studiocanal. These include opportunities for projects by producers who are very well established in Hollywood but otherwise passed over by the studios for reasons of scale, cultural content, or genre choices (e.g., the cases of Joel Silver and Working Title, each of whom had production deals with major studios

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Mass Producing European Cinema Table 1 Studiocanal’s tier 2 production budgets Film

Reported Production Budget

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) Robinson Crusoe (2016) Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) Serena (2014)

$21 million (Tutt 2011) €20 million (Naizy 2016) “Under” $25 million (Sandwell 2015) $17 million (Block 2013) $25 million (Macnab 2012)

while also working with Studiocanal). Arguably the most important film in Studiocanal’s commercial history resulted from the decision by Warner Bros. to put David Heyman’s Paddington into “turnaround,” which essentially meant it had shelved the project before Studiocanal agreed to finance it (see case study below). Another came from a pact with Aardman Animations to launch Shaun the Sheep Movie after its producers exited a partnership with Sony, with the Hollywood company turning down the chance to make Shaun (Sproxton 2016). Studiocanal has not been completely successful in picking winners out of the studios’ refuse. Indeed, We Are Your Friends (Max Joseph, 2015) and The Program, both high-profile flops produced by Working Title which had been passed over by Universal, were commercial and critical failures and therefore might be said to demonstrate the proverbial “genius of the [Hollywood] system.” However, in the best cases the company has been opportunistic in making interventions in the production sphere enabled by shifts in Hollywood’s production strategies.

Case study: Paddington Having grossed nearly $270 million at the international box office, including $119 million within Studiocanal’s confederation of distribution territories, and acting as the source of a potential multimedia franchise, Paddington is the single most important film of Studiocanal’s contemporary period. This is not solely because of its commercial success, but also for what its production story tells us about the development of Studiocanal during this period, including its growing ambitions, its relationship with important producers, and its changing place within the horizontally integrated Vivendi led by Vincent Bolloré. Made for a reported $55 million before marketing and distribution costs, Paddington is the highest budgeted film made during the Olivier Courson years

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and one of the company’s largest single production investments since Stargate, which was released exactly twenty years previously. While the company was credited as fully financing the film, its deal-making to cobble together the budget is remarkable and complex. French broadcaster TF1 not only prebought the broadcast rights for France but also invested enough in the project to share the copyright on the film. Presales were also made to Studiocanal’s sister companies Canal Plus and Cine Plus as well as to Amazon Prime for the UK and Germany. Studiocanal’s slate financing partner Anton Capital was also involved in financing while US distribution partner The Weinstein Company provided financial and creative support, with co-chairmen Bob and Harvey Weinstein receiving executive producer credits and helping to complete the film’s soundtrack (Fleming 2016a).3 Even with this coalition of funding in place, Studiocanal was taking a significant commercial and reputational risk with the project and unlike its previous big-budget efforts up to this point it had virtually no support from a Hollywood major. TWC, the US distribution partner, was an independent with finances that have grown increasingly precarious as the 2010s have gone on, particularly in 2017 long after the release of Paddington when the fallout from a sex scandal involving Harvey Weinstein imperiled the company and for a brief while the US release of Paddington 2. Outside of the United States, the only territory where the film was supported by a studio partner was in Spain, where Warner Bros. handled local distribution. The film was thus the fullest test to date of Studiocanal’s ability to work on an international scale without utilizing the major Hollywood studios. This would not be the case with the film’s sequel, which had Warner Bros. as the US distribution partner following the collapse of The Weinstein Company, but nevertheless Studiocanal was able to make the first film a success without a studio on board. If Studiocanal was therefore foregoing studio backing when it came to marketing and distributing Paddington, it was nonetheless relying on a Hollywood veteran when it came to producing the film. Heyday Films, led by producer David Heyman, was at the time that Studiocanal acquired Paddington (2012) (and to this day remains) under a first-look deal with Warner Bros. and boasted an illustrious track record with the studio, having overseen the production of the Harry Potter films. The company was also at the time in the midst of producing Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013), a major success for the studio. In many respects, the situation at Heyday Films in 2012 closely resembled that of Working Title. The company is based in London but maintains strong

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Hollywood connections, with more or less equal access to pools of creative talent in both countries. Also like Working Title (and other frequent Studiocanal partners such as Silver Pictures), Heyday found that in 2012 the studios were being more parsimonious and generally producing fewer features, particularly those with middle tier budgets. Heyday had been developing Paddington since 2007, but the project was shelved by Warners, leading Studiocanal to bid for the project (Jaafar 2014). In this sense we can thus see yet another instance in which the company has taken advantage of changing market conditions in Hollywood to make films that the studios were not at the time interested in making. Once the production of Paddington was under way, Heyman himself played a central role in shaping the project and marketing it to audiences (Jaafar 2014); indeed one report in the trade press went so far as to call the film a “passion project” for the producer (Hopewell and Lodderhose 2012). Heyman was instrumental in acquiring the source material and bringing on board writerdirector Paul King (something of a daring choice given King’s lack of experience at that point in family entertainment), but the producer’s influence can also be seen in the handling of visual effects for the film and the development of its screenplay. The idea all along with the project was to make it live-action with a CGI rendering of Paddington. With his experience on the Harry Potter films and Gravity, Heyman had cultivated a relationship with London-based VFX studio Framestore and this company would be responsible for creating the onscreen Paddington and the film’s myriad other effects. A great deal of the film’s development costs involved perfecting the representation of Paddington himself (Hopewell 2015a) and throughout the run-up to the release of Paddington there was a great deal of public consternation about the appearance of the beloved character. This anxiety was increased by one of the first still images released by Studiocanal to promote the film, an image which depicted Paddington standing in front of Buckingham Palace in his trademark hat and jacket, holding a suitcase. The image was immediately ridiculed on social media and branded “Creepy Paddington” due to the odd body language displayed in the image; internet jokesters subsequently began photoshopping “Creepy Paddington” into iconic scenes from classic horror movies such as The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) and The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) (Zarrell 2014). The quality of the VFX work in the finished film, however, put this controversy to rest. Not only does the film’s version of Paddington have relatable, very human facial expressions and body language, but the film is also able to feature Paddington in a range of comic and action-oriented situations that require great sophistication

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when it comes to the onscreen movement of the character. Just as had been the case in other Heyday/Framestore collaborations, at a technical level these were executed flawlessly (Figure 5). In addition to the postproduction work done on VFX, we can also see Heyman’s hand at work in the preproduction work that went on for Paddington. Producers almost always play a major part in script development and such was the case in the long development process for Paddington. While it is not possible to know exactly what notes were given by the producer or his company throughout the development process, there is at least enough evidence available to indicate that the process itself was long (from 2007 to 2013 when principle photography took place) and involved many people, making it in all likelihood a very complex process indeed. Paul King may be the only person given a “Written By” credit on the film, but twenty-two other people are credited with taking part in the writing of the script. These include Hamish McColl who is credited with co-creating the “screen story” as well as twenty-one people who are thanked at the end of the film’s credits for “helping with the screenplay.” This list of “script doctors” as supplemental writers are often called in industry circles includes notable British television comedians Julian Barrett and Simon Farnaby, as well as a host of others including famed actress and writer Emma Thompson, novelist Matt Haig, and a variety of experienced television and film screenwriters. Recruiting such a large and varied team would have required some wherewithal on the part of Heyman, as would have managing this team and homogenizing their respective inputs with the guiding vision of King himself. For supervising and synthesizing such a veritable “writers room,” we have to appreciate the role

Figure 5 Seamless integration of CGI and live action comic spectacle in Paddington.

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that a producer plays in shaping the finished film, even if in this case, they are never credited as having any part in the screenplay. While Heyman was therefore very important to Paddington, we should not overlook the roles played by many others involved in making the film. King’s unique sense of humor was vital to the project, as was his overall direction of the technically challenging film and his involvement is perhaps a good point at which to return to Studiocanal’s development as a company at this stage in their history, during which time the UK division had assumed such an important role in generating Anglophone projects and leading the international releases of films. King’s selection as writer-director, which was also central to the making of Paddington 2, can in part be traced back to Studiocanal UK’s roots in independent British film production. Optimum Releasing distributed King’s debut feature Bunny and the Bull (2009) and in so doing formed relationships with the filmmaker and cast members Farnaby and Barrett, who would later turn up in the aforementioned writing room (not to mention working on other Studiocanal works such as the 2016 feature Mindhorn [Sean Foley] and various development projects). Other members of the Paddington writing team would include Joe Cornish who wrote and directed Attack the Block for Studiocanal UK. Going beyond the making of the film, Studiocanal’s UK branch also oversaw the initial release of the film, and thereby set the tone for the worldwide reception of the film. The film’s marketing campaign was extensive as the company partnered with a number of tourism institutions to create Paddington-themed tours of London, while sponsoring other publicity opportunities such as the creation of Paddington statues designed by various celebrities (including Benedict Cumberbatch and former London mayor Boris Johnson) to leave on the “Paddington Trail” in London. The bear statues were later auctioned off just before the film’s release with the proceeds going to charity (Jaafar 2014). The end result of the Studiocanal UK marketing campaign was a very warm reception for the film in the UK, which included over $8 million at the box office in the opening weekend and glowing critical reviews. This positive word of mouth then helped set the stage for the film’s global roll out. Since the release of the film, Studiocanal’s marketing team has steadily grown in importance to the company as a whole, culminating in the 2017 promotion of a number of the executives at the subsidiary to senior positions overseeing all of Studiocanal’s marketing efforts (Clarke 2017a). The success of Paddington was thus the product of a confluence of factors, a confluence that was in many ways determined by certain historical and industrial

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developments that reflect back upon the historical changes detailed in this book. Whatever factors may have laid the groundwork for its success, Paddington continues to be the most important film property through which to observe the continuing evolution of Studiocanal. The success of the initial film led not only to the greenlighting of a sequel (one which is said to be more expensive than the original film [Grant 2017]), but also to the preemptive announcement of a third film in the series, speaking to the ways in which the company is aggressively targeting a true film franchise. Moreover, Studiocanal went so far as to acquire all rights to the character of Paddington the Bear, giving the company the ability to profit from the sales of books and merchandise based on the character. This has in turn led Vivendi to attempt to plug Paddington into its larger strategies focused on conglomerate synergies. As such there are plans in development for a Paddington animated television series (Hopewell 2017) and Vivendi subsidiary GameLoft released the game Paddington Run in the weeks before Paddington 2’s release. Besides the grand plans for Paddington, the success of the first film has encouraged the company to attempt to build other franchises around Britishthemed family films such as Aardman’s Shaun the Sheep Movie and Early Man. Whether or not these prospective transmedia franchises become as successful as Vivendi and Studiocanal hope it will remains to be seen, but the ambition alone speaks to the companies’ evolution from two decades ago when they missed the opportunities to create such franchises with lucrative Carolco properties like Stargate and The Terminator.

The importance of the library Another historically significant aspect of the contemporary incarnation of Studiocanal has been its possession and deployment of its back catalog, its library of rights to existing films and TV series. As has been intimated at several points in this book, simply possessing a significant library thus marks Studiocanal as a new kind of European studio. Why has this been an advantage over the company’s predecessors? As discussed, such a library generates cash flow on its own, the bulk of which is pure profit as initial marketing and production costs have been amortized. While exact figures on how much money has been generated by Studiocanal’s library over the years are not available, we can at least get a sense of the scale of the likely revenues from executive comments reported in 2016 indicated that in the 2015 sales from the library accounted

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for approximately 25 percent of the company’s total revenues (Roxborough and Richford 2016). This would indicate the library generated about €140 million in that year.4 Going further back, in 2006, the year in which Studiocanal acquired a distribution company in the UK, the company used this new subsidiary to more fully exploit its library amid the boom in DVD sales, releasing over 400 of its catalog titles on the format (Macnab 2006). Later it would use some of the titles in the catalog, including James Cameron’s Terminator 2 to enter the Chinese market via a streaming deal with SVOD services YoukuTodou and BesTV signed in 2014 (Keslassy 2014). This has come in addition to numerous releases of Blu Ray, 4K, and 3D versions of titles from the library including a theatrical rerelease of Terminator 2 in 3D in 2017. Besides this technology-based strategy of reissuing old content on new formats, the company also utilized its library in two important strategic manners as it sought to become a fully fledged film studio. The first of these involved remaking titles from the catalog. As was seen in the previous chapter, the company was active throughout the 2000s licensing remake rights for works such as Franҫois Ozon’s Swimming Pool (2003), a remake of La Piscine (Jacques Deray, 1969), the Coen brothers’ remake of the Ealing Studios comedy The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955), and numerous others. The company has since gone on to release numerous remakes, including The Tourist, a remake of Anthony Zimmer (Jérôme Salle, 2005), and A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino, 2015), yet another version of La Piscine, among others. At the time of this writing, the company has a number of other remakes in various stages of development, including a new version of Escape from New York (John Carpenter, 1981), which is being coproduced with Fox with an eye toward a “new” blockbuster franchise (Fleming 2015) (see Table 2). A less widely discussed, but no less significant, usage of the library in Studiocanal’s case has been as a tool with which to forge business and creative relationships. The partnership between Studiocanal and Optimum Releasing,

Table 2 Selected Studiocanal library title remake projects, 2009 onwards Original Film (Year of Release) Remake/Readaptation’s Year of Release Brighton Rock (1947) And Soon the Darkness (1970) Le Choc (1982) Don’t Look Now (1973) The Fallen Idol (1948)

2010 2010 2015 (as The Gunman) In Development (Kit 2015a) In Development (Fleming 2016b)

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which would become in many ways the crown jewel of its international distribution operation, began when Will Clarke and Danny Perkins, then co-CEOs of Optimum, met with the French company to seek the release of a new print of The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), a release which was incidentally Optimum’s first as a distributor (Ritman 2016). Likewise Eric Newman, who produced two films for Studiocanal (The Last Exorcism [Daniel Stamm, 2010] and its 2012 sequel), as well as the 2014 version of Robocop that Studiocanal heavily invested in, and who went on to form a production company backed by the French company (Grand Electric), first met with Studiocanal executives when seeking remake rights to the Jean-Pierre Melville thriller Le Doulos (1962) (Newman 2015). Finally, access to the Studiocanal library has been cited as a contributing factor for numerous other producers to sign long-term deals with the company (see, for instance, comments from producers in Roxborough and Richford 2016). Studiocanal’s exploitation of its library has thus made a multifaceted contribution to its development as a major international player in the 2010s, lending credence to Putnam’s prediction that a company with such an asset would be much better placed to be competitive on the global stage.

Moving more directly into film production With its current distribution network in place, Studiocanal at this point (in 2012) had access to a combined theatrical market of $4.9 billion as well as large ancillary markets. This, combined with a sales operation that regularly presells most of its films and television programs and the aforementioned library, has provided the basis for the company to increasingly move into production in order to secure future content and continue to utilize the library for remakes and reboots. To this end, the company invested in a Belgian animation outfit (NWave) in 2010 Spanish production company (Ombra Films) in 2011. With the full retinue of distribution territories in place, Studiocanal helped to found production companies by American producers Eric Newman (Grand Electric) and Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman (the Picture Company), former executives at Joel Silver’s companies in 2014. Another significant deal with American producers was a pact signed in 2016 to develop and produce four features with Hollywood veterans Walter Parkes and Laurie McDonald. Significantly, Studiocanal’s signing of these studio veterans are reminders of the gaps in the market that are being created by Hollywood’s shift away from tier 2 filmmaking toward big-

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budget tent poles as all involved had specialized in filmmaking in that range, with Newman’s difficult time on the making of Robocop with Sony, for example, serving to remind the producer of the lack of independence that comes with tent pole production (Newman 2015). To return to the company’s production investments, Studiocanal during this period also signed a co-production pact with Swedish distributor-producer Svensk Filmindustri in 2014 and held a slate financing deal with Anton Capital Entertainment since 2011 that provided Studiocanal with guaranteed equity investment in its biggest international films (for more on these types of deals, see Ulin, 2014, 106–12). Finally, the company forged a development pact with Terra Mater in 2017, a documentary producer with several notable credits to its name, including The Ivory Game (Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani, 2016) which was shortlisted for nomination for the Oscar for Best Feature Documentary. Collectively, all these movements showed Studiocanal to be evolving into a vertically integrated studio on the film side, and a number of moves on the television side would likewise make the company a horizontally integrated studio.

Acquiring and building television producers Accompanying the company’s move into film production has been a strategic move into television drama, a move that in many ways grew out of larger industrial convergence between the two media in Europe and globally in the 2010s. This move into television drama began with the acquisition in 2012 of Tandem Communications, a German-based producer of English-language television series. Tandem had a number of key works to its name by the time of the acquisition, but its most heralded production was Pillars of the Earth (2010) an eight-part miniseries set in medieval England which was sold across the globe after Tandem brokered a co-production agreement between networks in the United States (Starz), Canada (the CBC and The Movie Network), Germany (ProSiebenSat.1), and the UK (Channel 4) to commission the production. The skill that the company showed in assembling this complex sales and production deal without any larger corporate support created a model for independent co-production for the larger industry as a whole. This commercial sophistication came in addition to the drama’s audience appeal as it racked up nominations and awards as well as high ratings around the globe (Bondjeberg 2016, 9). Rola Bauer, one of the company’s founders, would later be recognized by the television

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sales community for her innovations in this regard with a Medal of Honor at the industry event MIPTV in 2016. Seeking to take advantage of the company’s acumen with sales and co-production, Tandem was for a time it was within Studiocanal tasked with being the TV sales and distribution arm of the company as a whole. A dedicated division was eventually set up to do this and it was staffed largely with executives from Tandem and Bauer herself was in 2016 designated as head of the company’s International Television division, based in Los Angeles and Munich. In this role, Bauer has carried out two related functions for Studiocanal: continuing developing and packaging Tandem projects and brokering co-production agreements on behalf of other productions made by other Studiocanal affiliates. This latter function has included bringing in second commissioners for series such as Beneath the Surface (ZDFNeo), The Child in Time (PBS), and Paranoid (Netflix), among others (Barraclough 2017a; Tartaglione 2017b; Tartaglione 2016). Besides these sales and production functions, Tandem has itself to date made two important series for Studiocanal (police procedural Crossing Lines and dark “dramedy” Spotless), while having also been commissioned to make the forthcoming series Take Two for a consortium of commissioners including ABC in the United States, VOX in Germany, and France Televisions. Following the acquisition of Tandem, Studiocanal made its next significant deal when it acquired Britain’s Red Productions in 2013. This firm, founded and run by producer Nicola Shindler, had its core in the UK with 98 percent of its revenue coming from that market at the time of the acquisition (Spicer and Presence 2016, 12), but also some global profile by virtue of its groundbreaking production of Queer as Folk in 1999 which was subsequently remade in the United States. Since its acquisition by Studiocanal, the company has steadily increased its global footprint. The highly acclaimed Happy Valley (BBC, 2014–) was commissioned in the UK but also sold in France to Canal Plus and to Netflix for many other parts of the world. A trilogy of series by Queer as Folk writer Russell T. Davies, Cucumber, Banana, and Tofu, with Cucumber (Channel 4, 2015) were coproduced by US network Logo, and an American remake of the series was reported to be in development in 2015 (Barraclough 2015). The company also licensed its miniseries The Driver for an American remake to Showtime (Andreeva 2015) and sold a number of other programs to Canal Plus, including The Five (2016), which was originally commissioned for Sky Atlantic in the UK. In 2016, the company also produced Paranoid (2016) for ITV and

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Netflix, a police procedural that saw its storyline across national borders from Britain to Germany as the main storyline involved a nefarious multinational pharmaceutical company based in Dusseldorf. The company also had two series commissioned by Canal Plus and its affiliated network C8, the former having ordered Monster’s Shrink and the latter coproducing Safe with Netflix both series are due to air in 2018. These series are Red’s first that were wholly commissioned by broadcasters outside the UK. The company looks set to continue exploring work with a foreign broadcaster as it is also developing at least one series for BBC America, a remake of The Quatermass Experiment (Littleton 2016). The company has also continued to work on contemporary-set British stories such as Ordinary Lies (BBC, 2015–) and Trust Me (BBC, 2017), and has landed at least two further commissions for British broadcasters for 2018 (Butterfly for ITV and Come Home for the BBC) in addition to a presumed third series of Happy Valley, but the international market continues to grow in importance for the company. Shindler herself has also continued to expand her activities within Studiocanal’s television production division. The Five as well as the 2018 miniseries Safe were made with Harlan Coben, the American author of bestselling mystery novels. The rapport established between Coben and Shindler would lead to the formation of a production company named Final Twist, which is dedicated to producing adaptations of the author’s novels into television series, adaptations that will be supervised by Shindler. To date this company has only one announced project in development—an adaptation of the novel Six Years (2013) for an as yet unspecified American network—but its very existence shows Shindler moving into new territory as a producer. Never having worked with an American writer and having largely avoided literary adaptations, Shindler is now doing both (Spicer and Presence 2016, 16). (In addition to the work with Coben, Monster’s Shrink is based on a graphic novel by French writer/director Joann Sfar, meaning yet more adaptation and cross-cultural collaboration.) Besides Final Twist, another company formed by Studiocanal involved tapping Shindler to oversee the establishment of the British-based production company Guilty Party. This company is intended to specialize in comedy and sitcoms and is based around Shindler and the creative talents of Simon Bird, Jonny Sweet, and Spencer Millman, all of whom are best known for their work in comedy, all being associated in various on the hit teen comedy series The Inbetweeners (E4, 2008–10) and its film versions. This company seems less of a departure in cultural terms for Shindler, but nonetheless it is something of a departure in terms of genre as Red has not produced many sitcoms in the past.

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Another move into television production for Studiocanal came via Scandinavia with a spate of deals from 2014 to 2015. Since the international successes of TV series such as Sweden’s Wallander (TV4, 2005–13) and Denmark’s Forbrydelsen/The Killing (DR, 2007–12) in the late 2000s and the subsequent successes of Borgen (DR, 2010–13) and Bron/Broen/The Bridge (SVT/DR, 2011–) in the 2010s, Scandinavia has become one of the hottest regions in Europe for TV drama production. It is thus not surprising that international distributors would begin to stake out this territory and Studiocanal did so with a number of deals. The first of these was the establishment in 2014 of a Denmark-based production subsidiary in the form of SAM Productions, whose founders are producer Meta Louise Foldager and writers Adam Price (the creator of Borgen) and Søren Sveistrup (creator of The Killing). By late 2016 the firm had landed three commissions and delivered twenty-eight hours of drama in 2017, all for Danish commissioners, though German and French networks have also been co-production partners on two series, with German network ZDFNeo boarding Beneath the Surface (Kanal 5, 2017) and Franco-German network ARTE co-financing Rides Upon the Storm (DR, 2017–). Though two partners in the firm are renowned for their writing for television, Foldager herself worked largely as a film producer before starting SAM. Her involvement is thus one of the many signs of the degree of convergence between film and television transpiring in European television drama during this period, convergence that Eva Novrup Redvall has argued is particularly characteristic of the production environment in Denmark (2013, 177–79). Foldager’s ability to move between the two media is particularly apparent in the case of SAM’s development of a readaptation of Pelle the Conqueror (Bille August, 1987). This project, which is being developed with HBO Nordic (Roxborough 2017), was originally developed by Foldager as a film at her production company Meta Film (Jensen 2012). As previously mentioned, Studiocanal also partnered with Scandinavian multinational distributor/producer Svensk Filmindustri (SF Studios), but beyond its film collaborations, the companies have also partnered for the development of two drama series. The two series developed by the companies collectively demonstrate the degree to which Studiocanal was seeking to cash in on the so-called Nordic Noir trend. The Lawyer, which ended up getting commissioned by streaming service Viaplay and Sweden and Denmark’s branches of TV3, was cowritten by Hans Rosenfeldt, creator of Bron/Broen. The other project

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developed by the two companies, The Ambassador, likewise has a distinguished pedigree, having been created by the late Henning Mankell, the famed novelist behind Wallander. Besides these deals, Studiocanal also signed a first-look television drama deal with Swedish writer/director Thomas Alfredson’s company SparkTV. Alfredson had previously directed Tinker Tailor for the studio and is attached to direct the follow-up feature Smiley’s People (Bevan 2016). Though no details about SparkTV’s development slate have been made public, the fact that Studiocanal sought to work with him and other film-based talents such as Foldager and Jens Lepidus (cowriter of The Lawyer as well as the writer of the Swedish hit film Easy Money [Daniel Espinosa, 2010], which incidentally Studiocanal plans to remake as part of its film deal with SF) yet again point to the extent of film and television drama convergence in Studiocanal’s plans and the European industrial landscape generally. Studiocanal dramatically increased its strategic commitment to television production with the simultaneous announcement of equity investments in three independent producers at the trade conference MIPTV in 2016. Two of these were British-based firms: Sunny March TV and Urban Myths Films. The former was at the time an unproven virtual startup cofounded by British star Benedict Cumberbatch. Studiocanal had already began developing a film project with Sunny March, The War Magician which had Cumberbatch attached to star (Kit 2015b) and this investment showed that Studiocanal was intent on deepening its ties to the star, who has become one of the most globally popular of all British actors in recent years following the blockbuster success of the TV series Sherlock. Though Sunny March TV lacked a track record as a producer at the time Studiocanal made its investment in the firm, within a year it had picked up two commissions, the TV film The Child in Time and the miniseries Patrick Melrose. Significantly, both works star Cumberbatch himself (as do nearly all the projects Sunny March has in development), demonstrating the commoditization of the producer’s star persona that lay at the heart of his company’s business plan. The partners in the second British firm Studiocanal invested in 2016, Urban Myths Films, had much more developed track records. Johnny Capps and Julian Murphy had worked at powerhouse indie Shine and there worked on several series including Channel 4’s hit series Sugar Rush (2005–06). The duo also made the fantasy series Merlin (BBC, 2008–12) on which Howard Overman was a staff writer. Overman would join Capps and Murphy when

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they founded Urban Myths in 2013 and the three went on to create the series Atlantis (2013–15) together, which ran on BBC One and BBC America for two seasons. Overman also created the cult sci-fi/fantasy series Misfits (E4, 2009– 13) which was popular on its release (having been commissioned for five series in total) and which attained global popularity in international syndication on platforms such as Netflix. Besides an established track record, the company also brought with it a clear generic and demographic niche that their work targeted, which was made clear with their first production under the aegis of Studiocanal, the 2016 series Crazyhead, which was commissioned by the youth-oriented network E4 and subsequently coproduced with Netflix. The series built on the company’s interest in fantasy and horror as well as teenage audiences with the story of twenty-something social outcasts who become demon hunters. The final production company that Studiocanal revealed a partnership with at MIPTV in 2016 was Bambú Producciones. This Madrid-based company, founded by Ramón Campos and Teresa Fernández-Valdez, already had a prolific track record at this time, having made a number of series for Spanish broadcasters and one also in co-production with Spanish network Antena 3 and distributor BBC Worldwide (Refugees [Antena 3, 2015]). Domestically, after getting their start in the founders’ native Galicia the company established itself on the national scene with Gran Reserva (2010–2013) for national public service broadcaster La 1 (TVE). Building on this success, the company went on to make the two series that made its international reputation: Grand Hotel (Antena 3, 2011–13), which has subsequently been remade in Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere and Velvet (Antena 3, 2014–16), which was a domestic smash hit while also finding large audiences in Latin America due in part to its syndication on Netflix. The first full year after Studiocanal’s investment (2017) saw the company deliver the first Spanish Netflix Original series (The Cable Girls) along with five other series, including a spinoff of Velvet (Velvet Collection) for pay-television network Movistar+ and Morocco: Love in the Time of War a period drama for broadcaster Antena 3. The company has also established a production presence in the Latin American market where the company was commissioned to script the telenovela In Untamed Lands for Mexican broadcaster Televisa. Since signing with Studiocanal, Bambú has become the most prolific of the studio’s television subsidiaries, having well over 100 hours of its series broadcast in 2017, more than half of Studiocanal’s total television output in that year.

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Studiocanal’s television strategies in the context of the “golden age” of television drama These moves into television production were not radical strategic decisions for Studiocanal to take at this point in history. The 2010s have become the period variously known as the “golden age” of television drama or “Peak TV” as demand for scripted drama within the industry—fueled by the proliferation of cable and satellite networks and the advent of streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime—has driven up prices to historic highs. This period has seen talents who would have at other points in time never considered working in television move to the supposedly “small screen” from filmmaking. The boom in “quality” drama has its roots in seminal series of the late 1990s and early 2000s including HBO’s The Sopranos (1999–2007) and Sex and the City (1998–2004), and burgeoned later in 2000s with series such as Breaking Bad (2008–13) and Mad Men (2007–15), among others. But television drama converged with the film industry most forcefully with two series made in the 2010s: HBO’s True Detective (2014–) and Netflix’s House of Cards (2013–), each of which featured A-list “film” stars (e.g., Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Kevin Spacey, etc.) and directing talent (Cary Fukunaga and David Fincher, respectively) as well as large budgets by television standards (in the case of some Netflix and HBO series over $10 million per episode). Super productions such as these have changed cultural perceptions and audience expectations of television. They have also changed business models and industrial practice. After a long period of creative gestation, House of Cards was packaged and developed by the creative team (showrunner Beau Willimon, director David Fincher, and others) with financial backing from distributor Media Rights Capital (MRC), who then pitched the project to various networks. This differed from the traditional American television model in which networks acquire ideas and develop and package them internally, thereby owning all rights to the series. Instead in the case of House of Cards, MRC retained some rights and financed the development of the series itself before selling it to Netflix (Lotz 2014, 107). Another industrial practice that has become very significant to the involvement of companies like Studiocanal in television production is one known as deficit financing. This is a practice wherein a distributor advances a sum of money to a producer to cover the difference between the license fee paid by the commissioning broadcaster and the actual cost of making the series. The distributor then hopes

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to sell the series in other markets to make more than they paid out to cover these costs and thus turn a profit. Deficit financing has long been used by American studios to finance big-budget television series shown on their own networks that they hoped would recoup costs in syndication and international sales markets (Havens 2006, 35), but since the 2000s many independents (including Lionsgate and Entertainment One) have come to the fore, developing, financing, and selling series in a way that increasingly—since House of Cards, especially—resembles independent film financing and sales. In pursuing a similar strategy, Studiocanal on average provides about 20 percent of the total production budgets of the series it distributes as deficit financing in lieu of international rights (Darmon 2015a). (Studiocanal does not distribute all of the works of its production affiliates, it should be noted.) Series financed and sold in this manner are then typically packaged with films from the same distributors in order for the distribution company to act as a sort of “one stop shop” for international broadcasters seeking to buy content in bulk (Havens 2006, 29). This too seems to have been undertaken by Studiocanal as the company consolidated its film and television operations under a single executive (Anna Marsh) in 2017, thereby erasing the specialized division of labor between the sales of the two media (Keslassy 2017a). This executive reshuffle has coincided with practices in its television business that resemble the acquisition of independent works in its film business. The first of these was the Italian series La Porta Rossa (RAI, 2017) and the second was the forthcoming Katla from Iceland, which the company acquired at the script stage. The company has also been tasked with the international distribution of a number of Canal Plus original series, effectively acting as the international distribution arm of the network in a way that imitates the vertically integrated corporate design of US broadcasters. By picking up such titles solely for their international sales potential, Studiocanal is moving further and further away from being a film studio and closer to being a content provider that uses the business practices of an independent film studio. These one-off deals are the exception, however, and investing in producers has been the predominant practice at Studiocanal, which is in keeping with industry trends. Since the mid-2010s, television distributors have been preoccupied with acquiring production houses so as to control properties from their inception, while heretofore independent producers have sought the backing of bigger distribution companies to ensure the development funds they need to package competitive series. Another incentive for producers in this arrangement is more control over—and share in—the international sales they were not guaranteed

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under the traditional models of working solely with broadcasters. As discussed above, this trend in television distribution is also something that Studiocanal has followed with great gusto.

Film studio any longer? The many convergences of film and television at Studiocanal and elsewhere With such a set of corporate acquisitions from 2012 to 2016 and a number of series acquisitions of Canal Plus originals and other sources, Studiocanal has steadily built up its total television output from ten hours in 2013—a single series in fact, the first of Crossing Lines—to nearly 200 hours in 2017 (see Table 3). This is still some ways off matching the output of a Hollywood studio or indeed even European peers such as Entertainment One, but nevertheless it shows how the top film studio in Europe is rapidly becoming equal parts, if not more of, a television studio, in so doing following the larger patterns found across the industry as a whole. This brings us to what these trends mean for the relationship between the two media in Studiocanal’s strategies and in the screen industries in general. We can begin this exploration by returning to the increasing mobility of creative talent between film and television. I have already discussed some of the stars and producers that Studiocanal is working with in both media simultaneously, but the relationships do go deeper than that. Studiocanal series have, like their counterparts in the United States, increasingly drawn on directing talents. Pascal Chamueil, for example, who was known in France as the director behind popular comedies such as Heartbreaker (2010) and A Long Way Down (2014), directed the first two episodes of Spotless. Pierre Morel of Taken fame, who has also directed one film for Studiocanal (The Gunman), has Table 3 Number of television hours produced by Studiocanal, 2013–17 Year

Hours Aired

2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

10 33 67 76 189

Key Series Crossing Lines Happy Valley S1, Last Tango in Halifax S3 Cucumber, Banana, Tofu; Spotless; The Last Panthers The Five; Baron Noir S1; Crazyhead; Velvet S4 The Cable Girls; Rides Upon the Storm; The Lawyer

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been attached to develop a feature for the company (Victor the Assassin) as well as the television series Lionhearts: The Crusades which is in development with the BBC. Joann Sfar has moved from his work as a director and animator— an oeuvre that includes the acclaimed biopic Gainsbourg (2010) and the wellreceived animated film The Rabbi’s Cat (2011)—to work on the series Monsters’ Shrink. Other cross over talents in this vein include Kaspar Barfoed and Per Fly, who have worked with SAM and writers such as Jack Thorne, who scripted The Last Panthers as well several film projects for Studiocanal. What at one point would have been a symptom of the relative underdevelopment of the European film industry vis-à-vis Hollywood—that its filmmakers had to make a living working in television—has now become a marker of the quality of television as the idea of the film auteur, so vital to European film culture, is now used as a branding instrument for television. These creative links between the media are also a symptom of rising budgets and production values in television, a widely documented aspect of the new “golden age” of television. These production values are routinely on a par with what most viewers expect from big budget, theatrically released films. Recouping such costs thus becomes a major risk that is assumed by television distributors. Deficit financing has become for television series equivalent to the minimum guarantees against international sales, the traditional wagers of the independent film industry. The convergences at the business level between the heretofore distinct industries were underscored starkly by comments made to Variety by Lionsgate executive Zygi Kamasa in 2017: The film producers who have a lot of experience at putting together independent films—a patchwork of financing with gaps and tax credits, and two or three European partners—are extremely well set up to assemble television shows because TV is becoming very much like that. . . . The historical TV model of going to a broadcaster and getting them to finance the whole show for the U.K. marketplace is long gone. (Barraclough 2017b)

Indeed, many veteran film producers have echoed Kamasa’s comments, saying that their skills are approximately the same as those required of producers of high-end television drama (Bevan 2016) and just as film producers aspire for their projects to be the subjects of bidding wars between film distributors, now television drama producers hope for the same outcome for their series. It is not uncommon in the late 2010s to see series announced in the trade press with all the creative elements seemingly in place, but without an actual

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network attached, a promotional strategy seemingly intended to spark such bidding wars. Studiocanal’s stable of producers such as Red and Bambú, who have up to this point in their careers worked almost exclusively with local broadcasters to develop projects, have in recent years publicly discussed projects without broadcaster attachments. (The Portrait of a Lady in the case of Red [Jaafar 2016b] and an untitled mystery-thriller set along the Camino de Santiago in the case of Bambú [Moreno 2016a].) Tandem has more experience in this sort of packaging, having essentially developed and shopped projects such as Pillars of the Earth without initial broadcaster support and it is thus not surprising that they are the most prolific among Studiocanal’s subsidiaries in announcing such projects, having done so with at least four projects to date, including Take Two which was first mentioned in the media in March of 2016 (Roxborough) and then was later ordered to series late in 2017. Other series promoted in this way by Tandem include Brazza, a Congo-set gangster saga (Lodderhouse 2016), and Deep City, a musical drama set in Miami (Tartaglione 2017a). Such arrangements shift some of the risk in television production from broadcasters to distributors as the latter chase commissions. While it is too early to say if this will result in a major shift in the television production industry, for now it is at least possible to say that film business models are coming to television production and that Studiocanal’s involvement in the television industry is very much a case in point for industrial convergence in this sense.

European studios and television production and distribution There are several observations worth making at this point to underscore the historical dimensions and significance of Studiocanal’s movement into television drama. First, it marks an act of diversification that is unique among its historical predecessors. Of these, only PFE intended to become a television distributor on par with what Studiocanal is currently aspiring to reach. Michael Kuhn saw the importance of horizontal integration from early on and to this end acquired a library of television content in 1994. But this market for television was not as lucrative then in the mid-1990s as it is now with the proliferation of cable networks and streamers mainly taking place after PFE had been shuttered. Undaunted, PFE moved into production and sales of its series in the late 1990s, looking to remake films such as The Crow and Total Recall as series. By this point,

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however, it was too late to change the company’s fortunes and PFE as a whole was shut down just as its new series were hitting the airwaves. If PFE working in the 1990s could not make horizontal integration workable for a nascent European film studio, it is not surprising that its predecessors had little or no success in this regard. Even the Hollywood studios only really got into this business in a major way in the1990s as the easing of regulations permitted the adoption of conglomerate strategies that favored acquiring television assets, a trend that kicked off in earnest with Disney’s acquisition of Capital Cities, owner of the ABC television network, in 1995 (Schatz 2008, 27). Even if its historical predecessors did not have access to the televisual strategies that it has now undertaken, Studiocanal’s contemporaries certainly do. As was discussed in the introduction to this book, all the major corporate players in contemporary European cinema, with the exception of Pathé, have television divisions producing and distributing drama series. Industrial convergence between film and television is thus one of the key distinguishing features of this period. Studiocanal by virtue of its links to Canal Plus is the only one of these companies that is fully integrated in terms of production, distribution, and exhibition when it comes to TV drama. This puts the company’s TV business in competition with the likes of Sky (which owns distribution arm Sky Vision and stakes in a slew of producers), the BBC (with BBC Worldwide), and Britain’s ITV in terms of being integrated television studios. It is thus worth stepping back for a moment to examine the strategic logic behind achieving this kind of integration. From the point of view of parent company Canal Plus, international sales are necessary to be able to offset the increasing costs of production in this competitive environment, where a network in one country cannot necessarily afford the kind of quality production values necessary to compete with imports which are on rival networks.5 For this reason, Studiocanal has been tasked by Canal Plus with selling a number of its original drama productions, regardless of the fact that Studiocanal itself did not produce these. Such works include French series such as Baron Noir (2016–) and Séction Zero (2016) as well as co-commissioned series like The Last Panthers (with Sky) and Midnight Sun (with Sweden’s SVT; 2016–) and even at least one commission from Canal Plus’s Poland subsidiary, The Teach (2016–). A sales arm also allows a company like Studiocanal to cash in on these rising costs by selling its own projects to other networks, regardless of whether or not Canal Plus commissions those works. Indeed, to date Studiocanal owned production companies have only produced one Canal Plus commission (2015’s Spotless, made by Tandem), with two others

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slated to air in 2018 (Monsters’ Shrink and Safe, both made by Red Productions). The company’s producers have instead relied on networks elsewhere as their primary commissioners, even if they sometimes sell their works on to Canal Plus later on. This lack of commissioning by Canal Plus is quizzical given the ways in which most integrated studios seek synergies between their various divisions and one wonders why no French producers have been sought as partners, but nevertheless the current structure at least allows for diversification and in cases where Canal Plus buys programming from Studiocanal’s producers, cheaper supply of programs for the parent company.

Larger corporate contexts: The Bolloré regime at Studiocanal Having provided an overview of Studiocanal’s internal development in this crucial period in its history, it is important to close this chapter with some reflection on the external factors shaping the company during this time, particularly those pertaining to the pressures form upper management at Vivendi. Besides completing the narrative picture of Studiocanal’s development in what is its most important era, this section of the chapter is also important for historiographical reasons. As should be clear by this point in this study, studios are greatly affected by the larger power structures surrounding the companies themselves, particularly in cases where the studio is a small part of a larger organization. Not only have we seen the influence that managers can have on studios with the debacle created by Jean-Marie Messier’s leadership of Vivendi, but other attempts at European studio-building have seen their fortunes dramatically altered—typically for the worst—by decisions made by upper management. The most glaring case in point perhaps would be UFA which as Kriemeier has argued was never able to fully recover from the interference of the Nazi government in the 1930s and 1940s in the management of the firm. The Rank Organization was also greatly affected by governmental policy in the 1940s but the decline of the company as a production power was also self-inflicted to a degree as success with other ventures such as Xerox led to the company marginalizing its film business from the 1960s onward. Another example closer in time to Studiocanal is Polygram Filmed Entertainment, whose fate was sealed when a change of management at parent company Philips sparked the sale of Polygram Records to Seagram’s, a corporation that had no interest whatsoever in owning PFE.

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At the dawn of the new international expansion under Courson, the CEO consistently spoke of Studiocanal’s independence from Canal Plus, telling one interviewer that the companies were “cousins” rather than Studiocanal being a subordinate subsidiary (Goodridge 2010). This apparent independence was curtailed with the ascent at Vivendi of Vincent Bolloré, whose takeover of the management of the conglomerate in 2014 led to a shakeup at Canal Plus in 2015, leading to the departure of many key executives including the group’s CEO Bertrand Meheut and head of cinema Nathalie Costes-Cerdan. This shakeup ultimately led to similar upheaval at Studiocanal, which included the departures within a calendar year of the studio’s senior management team of CEO Olivier Courson and COO Romain Bessi; head of distribution Rodolphe Buet followed shortly thereafter in 2017. Replacing Courson as CEO was Canal Plus’s new head of Film, Didier Lupfer, who was joined by Stéphane Célérier, formerly head of distribution at the company before departing at the time of Courson’s appointment CEO in 2007, who joined as vice-president of Development. Management rhetoric at Vivendi then stressed the integration of the various units of the conglomerate and a search for “synergies” between the subsidiaries. Bolloré inherited a Canal Plus that was hemorrhaging subscribers in France and this led to major cost cutting at company. Whether it be due to these cuts, the search for synergies or just transition in management, Studiocanal saw a dramatic drop in revenue in 2016, over 25 percent in total (Vivendi 2017a, 194). This decline continued into 2017, with management faulting the underperformance of the film slate in particular (Vivendi 2017b, 15), a slate that would have largely been inherited from the previous management team. Indeed, 2016’s releases did perform badly at the box office, with only Bridget Jones’s Baby reaching over $20 million in grosses for the company, and that from only two territories as the company shared distribution rights with Universal. Up until the release of Paddington  2 in November of 2017, the remainder of the company’s international releases performed very poorly. This period of transition to Lupfer/Bolloré also saw changes in greenlighting decisions. Bolloré himself joined the greenlighting committee (Baudriller 2017) and the company dropped some development projects that were underway under Courson (e.g., Entebbe, a project developed with Working Title which turned to Participant Media for financing) and one production partner, NWave, completely broke off its relationship with the company, unhappy about the time it was taking to get projects greenlit (Macnab 2017).

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These breaks from Courson-era partnerships and the rehiring of Célérier were interpreted in the trade press as attempts to focus more on the French market (Jaafar 2016c). Deepening this suspicion was the company public relations strategy during this transition. In a move that recalls Sichler’s retrenching in 2004, the company once again began giving more rhetorical emphasis to its French language and in some cases German-language productions. Hence the announcements of sales slates at Berlin and Cannes in 2016 featured films such as From the Land to the Moon (Nicole Garcia, 2016) and Back to Burgundy (Cedric Klapisch, 2017). This seeming emphasis on local production was accompanied by a number of box office successes for the company’s French- and Germanlanguage films. This began with the company’s 2015 release of Heidi which was a hit in Germany (over 1.2 million admission) as well as France where it garnered over 700,000 admissions, a rare feat for a German-language feature; all told, the film recorded over 3.3 million admissions across Europe. The company also had a number of films break the 1 million admissions mark in France, traditionally a benchmark for success in the nation for French-language films. Between 2016 and 2017 the company had five films surpass 1 million admissions and one— Alibi.com (Phillippe Lecheau, 2017)—surpass 4 million, making it Studiocanal’s biggest hit in the French market in over a decade, harking back to the last days of Sichler as CEO. Whatever proclamations the company’s sales and PR teams were making about local markets, internationally the company with less fanfare and publicity seemed to more or less adhere to the formula that brought it success in 2014 with its 2017/2018 slate relying heavily on a Paddington sequel and a Liam Neeson action vehicle (The Commuter). Similarly, 2018/2019 relies on Aardman releases Early Man and Shaun the Sheep 2 as well as another Neeson action film, Hard Powder, as such it closely resembles the slate of 2015, which was built around Shaun the Sheep Movie and the action film The Gunman, which starred Sean Penn in the aging male star position. Such continuity in production (it is worth noting that production executive Ron Halpern remained in his position throughout the larger shakeup) makes it difficult to say definitively if the company is experiencing a major strategic shift or are simply retooling under a new management team to continue along the same lines as those previously pursued under the old one. The move into television production, with the aforementioned acceleration of output in 2017, may seem a departure, but these moves were orchestrated by previous management, particularly Romain Bessi who personally oversaw the acquisitions of production companies in 2016

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before departing shortly after their announcement. It is therefore difficult at this moment in time to gauge exactly how the management changes will affect this aspect of Studiocanal’s business and output. Rhetorically at least, besides the emphasis on the French market, Vivendi since 2015 has mandated that Studiocanal find more common ground and joint ventures with its corporate siblings. This may perhaps explain the heightened levels of collaboration with Canal Plus on several series, but the most conspicuous discussion of “synergies” has been in terms of collaboration with Universal Music Group. Seeking ways to collaborate with UMG has led Studiocanal to develop films (e.g., Yardie, a Jamaican-themed gangster film) and television series (e.g., the aforementioned Deep City) with strong musical components. Time will tell if these works will achieve the synergies sought with the conglomerate organization of Vivendi under Bolloré. Regardless of how things proceed from here, the shakeups that occurred under Bolloré are yet another reminder of the importance of the larger corporate picture surrounding Studiocanal. Being part of a larger conglomerate has been and will likely continue to be a double-edged sword for Studiocanal. On one hand, the company’s durability up to this point is a reminder of some of its key distinguishing features from predecessors such as PFE. The natural fit within a pay-television operator has meant that buyers (Vivendi, the Bolloré group) knew what they are getting when they have made moves for Studiocanal’s parent companies. Moreover, the company has had a relative degree of stability and scale that would be the envy of its competitors and predecessors. The recent upheavals at EuropaCorp, for example, have been much more acute than those at Studiocanal, as have those at Wild Bunch, where rising expenses were an existential threat to the company in 2016 when it barely staved off bankruptcy. On the other hand, being part of a larger organization in the 2010s, as in the early 2000s, has made Studiocanal a hostage to the fortunes of its parent companies. Such is both the blessing and the curse of the strategies of vertical and horizontal integration that Studiocanal is bound up in and which has made the company so historically unique and important within European film history. Whatever its future might hold, the company’s track record over the decade since the release of My Blueberry Nights constitutes one of the largest and most important bodies of work in the history of European studios, and the rest of this book will be dedicated to analyzing that corpus and what it tells us about European studios in global markets.

Part Two

Studiocanal’s Works, 2006 Onwards

5

The European Studio as Creative Force: Defining and Analyzing Studiocanal’s Output

Having chronicled the history of Studiocanal and the evolution of its corporate strategies, in this section of the book I will now turn my attention to the films and television series that Studiocanal has produced since its return to the global stage in the late 2000s. This discussion will take the form of three chapters. The first of these will be concerned with providing an overview of the corpus as a whole, explaining which films and television programs should be considered as Studiocanal’s output, and then commenting on particular tendencies and trends within that corpus. The next two chapters will be concerned with examining the two overarching artistic/industrial strategies that have guided Studiocanal’s approach to production and marketing over this period. These strategies share a concern with genre, which, unsurprisingly for a studio engaged in mass production, is at the forefront of thinking about films and series. They also diverge when it comes to questions of taste, with one tendency favoring middlebrow approaches to genre production and the other adopting a more broadly popular approach. This distinction subsequently shapes a great deal of the company’s films’/series’ artistic and representational strategies and thus ends up having tangible consequences for how the texts in question act as works of European film and television.

Outlining the corpus: Studiocanal’s financing practices Before taking on such questions, however, we must begin by detailing what exactly we mean when we speak of a Studiocanal film or series. As was discussed throughout the previous chapters, Studiocanal during this period is

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not primarily a producer of content per se, but instead is in the business of distributing content. But then a core component of its work as a distributor of films and series involves creating works to fill its sales and distribution pipeline. It is thus uncontroversial to begin this discussion of corpus by including all the works for which Studiocanal provided production finance and/or works which were produced by companies in which Studiocanal holds an equity position, a criterion that is particularly important for the company’s television series, the distribution of which has been more complex than that of their film counterparts. Such a list would include many of the feature films it has distributed internationally as well as some it has distributed only in one or two of its territories, in most cases these are the same nations in which the films were made. Typically, Studiocanal also manages the international sales for such projects, but the films usually do not receive significant theatrical releases outside of their home countries and instead are released directly to home video in other markets. Given my concern with Studiocanal’s international ambitions and the related question of European cinema rather than individual national cinemas, I have chosen to only discuss these works, which I will refer to simply as “local films,” in passing. It is not that such work is not important to our understanding of Studiocanal’s impact on European and global screen cultures, but, with few exceptions, these films have made little impact outside of their home countries and are therefore “national” in ways that require different questions than those which I am pursuing in this book. During the period under discussion, only one of these films (which also, unsurprisingly, are all made in languages other than English) had any large-scale commercial success outside of its home country: Heidi, which was discussed in the previous chapter. Studiocanal’s efforts to market the film across the continent once it began to find audiences across Europe place it in my corpus of Studiocanal’s international output, but it is not joined by any other local films from France or Germany, even if other films such as Mon Roi (Maïwenn, 2015) and Tschick/ Goodbye Berlin (Fatih Akin, 2016) have garnered a degree of international critical acclaim. Even though I will not belabor this point, it is interesting to note that the strategies for international production and distribution, which I will document and analyze in the following two chapters, have largely been replicated on a smaller scale in Studiocanal’s local output during this period, with the only conspicuous difference being that the local output features proportionally more comedies than the international output.

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There is one group of local films that I have included in this study: those coming from the UK. Such works, even in the cases of very parochially British subject matter (e.g., Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa [Declan Lowney, 2013] or Mindhorn), generally speaking have a greater deal of hope for international success invested in them by their distributors by virtue of their use of the English language and, often, the inclusion of internationally recognizable stars such as Steve Coogan (who stars not only in Alan Partridge, but also The Look of Love [Michael Winterbottom, 2013]). The hopes for international success translate to higher production values than the films’ local counterparts in Germany and France. The films typically receive US theatrical releases, albeit sometimes limited releases, and since the acquisition of Hoyt’s in 2012, they have also received direct distribution by Studiocanal in Australia and New Zealand, but they also rarely receive theatrical distribution from Studiocanal in France or Germany. In distinguishing these from their non-Anglophone counterparts, I am reflecting on the dual local/global distribution plan that the majors have long pursued in the UK, a strategy that has seen Fox Searchlight, for instance, achieve crossover global hits with seemingly very parochial titles such as The Full Monty, The Last King of Scotland (Kevin Macdonald, 2006), or The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden, 2011). In some cases, such as 2015’s Macbeth (Justin Kurzel), what seem to have begun as local British productions became global releases for Studiocanal.1 Further speaking to the permeability between the two categories of production at Studiocanal was the realignment of international production activities by the company in 2016 which augmented the role of Studiocanal UK’s CEO Danny Perkins—who works as an executive producer on all of the company’s local British productions—within the company’s management of internationally oriented production (Goodfellow 2016). While some may question the exclusion of the French and German locallanguage films, my designation of fully financed and local UK productions as Studiocanal films will be less controversial as these are films for which, Studiocanal was the leading corporate entity in creating the conditions that led to their existence. But this part of the book will also consider other works as relevant for our understanding of the company’s impact on global screen culture. One kind of production that must be included in this discussion is the co-productions that Studiocanal has made with international partners. These are works that Studiocanal cofinanced and coproduced with other production entities. There have been relatively few of these in the period I am examining, particularly compared to Studiocanal’s past work as a cofinancier

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of Hollywood films, as was documented in previous chapters. Indeed, one of the distinguishing features of the period under examination was the company’s strategic desire to control sales and distribution rights on its works, as opposed to the subordinate positions it had found itself in vis-à-vis Hollywood partners during earlier periods. Even with such an overarching strategic bent since the late 2000s, Studiocanal still partnered with Sony to make The Tourist as well as 2929, the production arm of the US distributor Magnolia, to make Deadfall and Serena. Moreover, the company also reteamed with Universal on Bridget Jones’s Baby, which, as a legal legacy of its previous accords with the studio, utilized roughly the same terms that marked the Working Title collaborations from 1999 to 2009 (Bevan 2016). In all of these cases as well as works currently in development as studio co-productions (including an adaptation of Danger Mouse in development with Sony [Lyons 2015] and the slate of works in progress with SF Studios discussed in the previous chapter, among others), the financial and creative input of Studiocanal cannot be ignored and the subsequent circulation of the completed works across Studiocanal’s network should be considered if we are to fully understand the company’s effects on European screens. This book’s orientation toward Studiocanal’s European dimensions should not obscure the fact that the company has throughout this latest period continued to work closely with the Hollywood studios. Not only has the company had an important partnership with Working Title, a wholly owned subsidiary of Universal, but a number of its biggest international hits, including Unknown and Non-Stop, have been achieved via licensing deals with the studios in key markets. So while rivalry and competition are fundamental aspects of film and television distribution, we should never overlook the amount of collaboration that continues to exist in the global screen business, just as Chapter 1 showed has been a regular occurrence throughout European and American film history. Concerns related to this book’s desire to understand Studiocanal’s broader impact on European and global screens are also at the heart of another category of films specifically that I have included in this study. These are works for which Studiocanal has acquired the distribution rights for the entirety of its network, as it has done intermittently since the acquisition of Kinowelt in 2008. Using its scale as a confederated distribution company, the company has acquired the territorial rights to films ranging from The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance, 2012) to Robocop to The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2017).

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Such multiple-territory acquisitions (“MTAs” as I will henceforth refer to them) should be included in the Studiocanal corpus for a number of reasons. Not only do they tell us a great deal about how the company imagines its audiences and their supposedly unified tastes, but they also are revealing of Studiocanal’s artistic and commercial strategies. It is telling in this regard that the same executive who has overseen international production during this period—Ronald Halpern—has been charged with managing such acquisitions. The obvious inference to be drawn here is that similar films are sought in each case and the films themselves bear this out, as we will see by virtue of their coherence with the company’s wider corpus. One could argue that there is perhaps too a fine distinction to be made between these films and works for which Studiocanal acquired more than one set of territorial rights (e.g., The Imitation Game [Morten Tyldum, 2014]) and the MTAs, but what I am interested in here are the works that Studiocanal centrally decides to invest in rather than those to which one or two of the territorial distribution offices took a fancy. It is also worth pointing out that MTAs on Studiocanal’s part can also be seen as generative of new films in that the sale of a film to these four territories can help to “greenlight” a production even without a North American distributor being in place, as was the case with The Lost City of Z. The film, which Studiocanal acquired for all of its territories before it began production, was only picked up for distribution in the United States by Amazon/Bleecker Street after it had been screened at the New York Film Festival in 2016. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of each of these films, the industrial impact of Studiocanal’s multiterritory purchasing power is yet another reason to consider these works as Studiocanal titles, even if the company did not ultimately end up owning the underlying copyright for the films. A similar rationale for inclusion applies for another category of Studiocanal films and, in this case, TV dramas. These are works for which Studiocanal acquired some or all global sales rights. In the film business this typically— though not always—entailed also acquiring distribution rights for all of its national territories, meaning that there is some overlap with the category of the MTA. Films in this category include a number of non-Anglophone titles such as A War (Tobias Lindholm, 2015), El Niño (Daniel Monzón, 2014), and The Hundred-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Felix Herngren, 2013). Television series acquired in this fashion include a slew of Canal Plus original commissions, including The Last Panthers, Baron Noir, and others, as well as third-party acquisitions such as La Porta Rossa. Such works

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remind us of the importance of appreciating Studiocanal’s larger corporate contexts for understanding its activities—after all, as previously discussed these are clear cases of Vivendi/Canal Plus seeking to generate synergies between its/ their various subsidiary companies—but it also speaks once again to the ways in which Studiocanal generates content. The minimum guarantees/distribution advances that the company provides for these shows and films is what effectively ensures that they will exist. This is inscribed into the business model for television series as described in Chapter 4 and is implicit in the independent film financing model, but it is worth remembering that in the case of a film like El Niño, the sales company’s minimum guarantee was the vital last piece of the financing puzzle that allowed the film to go into production (Lodderhouse and Hopewell 2011). Measuring the industrial and cultural impact that Studiocanal has had during this period thus means including these acquisitions. The final category of Studiocanal works I will include in this study is perhaps destined to be the most problematic to rationalize and difficult to analyze, in no small part because they do not—at the time of this writing anyway—exist as films or TV series and in most cases they likely never will. These are works that Studiocanal or its producing partners have disclosed to be in development with Studiocanal’s financial backing. Researching films and series in this category has some obvious limitations, beginning with the question of existence already mentioned. Hollywood studios are estimated to greenlight, on average, 5 percent or one out of every twenty works that they put into development. European producers are estimated to end up making a film or series 16 percent of the time they put something into development, meaning one out of every six projects makes it from this stage to being a completed work (Finney 2015, 32). During the course of this research, I have not been able to determine Studiocanal’s rate of completion, though such information would no doubt cast yet more light on the question of the company’s working methods and their adherence to either American or European standards. Even without concrete statistics it is safe to assume that the vast majority of what is discussed under the auspices of this category will never make it to the screen. Before justifying why we should then pay attention to such works, we should also reflect on the difficulty of actually knowing what works a studio is developing or has developed. In some cases the development slate is a closely guarded secret or at least the entirety of its contents is not in the public domain. For this reason, I do not claim that my list of Studiocanal’s works in development is anywhere near complete or exhaustive. The full slate of works developed

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by Studiocanal or currently in development is surely much bigger than what functions as my corpus in this regard. In an interview with a trade publication, current CEO Didier Lupfer claimed that Studiocanal had at that particular time “up to” 100 television series in development with just its production affiliates (Roxborough and Richford 2016). The number of projects that I am aware of is mere fraction of that figure, as can be seen in Appendix 2, which lists a total of ninety-seven projects from film and television combined (Lupfer’s comments referred only to the television projects). The titles that could be discovered to be in development were almost always found in the trade press, meaning these were likely already vetted for viability by the company and in some ways being put in the “shop window”, so to speak, for potential partners in production or distribution. The other major source of development titles beyond the trade press was the producers themselves, some of whom agreed to be interviewed for this book. Here again we risk getting a distorted view of the slate as producers were likely to only mention projects that they felt had a good chance of going into production, in a similar fashion to the works they choose to discuss in the trade press. This serves as an important reminder to heed Wilkinson and Merle’s advice, discussed in the introductory chapter of this book, to read trade discourses with care (2013). The list of works in development included in this book is thus incomplete and skewed in emphasis by the agendas of producers, journalists, networks (in the case of television series), and Studiocanal itself. So why discuss these titles at all? Whatever problems may be inherent in researching the company’s development pipeline are ultimately outweighed by the insights into the strategies and future plans that are afforded by whatever glimpses into what they hope to create, even if much of that never comes to pass. Just as looking at the footage that is cut out of a completed film or at an author’s unpublished manuscripts can tell us important things about that film or that author, looking at what Studiocanal would have liked to have made at different junctures in its history, as well as what the company is currently hoping to get made, can give us a fuller view of the company’s artistic and industrial ambitions. Such works are particularly important for giving us a more complete sense of how it is that the company imagined its markets and what would succeed there and globally, both of which are vital questions for this book. Moreover, development is an industrial activity in and of itself upon which producers depend for parts of their livelihood. Understanding the broader impact of Studiocanal on the global screen industries thus means paying attention to this unrealized body of work.

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The development pipeline and especially changes therein can also give us some insights into how the company’s strategies have grown and changed over time, as well as the ways in which it seeks to publicly promote those strategies. The way that the company backed certain projects (e.g., Entebbe) at some point in their development, only to pull out later can be seen as significant, just as its persistence in trying to get others made—which can be seen, for example, in the cases of the long-gestating remakes of The Dam Busters (Michael Anderson, 1955), Le cercle rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970), and Cliffhanger—is also telling of strategic continuity over a number of years at the company. Finally, we should also be aware of the ways in which the publicity-generating qualities of revelations of Studiocanal’s development pipeline, which when read against the grain, can reveal a great deal regarding Studiocanal’s attempts to manage its brand and appearance in media discourses. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the development of The Paris Architect, a project which was revealed in the trade press in 2016. This announcement followed a previous announcement of a contest that Studiocanal and its production affiliate The Picture Company sponsored with The Black List—an Americanbased service dedicated to developing and promoting screenwriting talent— to give an award to an aspiring screenwriter who was also an EU citizen (Kit 2016a). The winning contestant turned out to be Briton Chris Salmanpour and he was subsequently commissioned to adapt The Paris Architect, working with The Picture Company, with the idea that the completed screenplay may end up being a Studiocanal film. Even if this film is never made,2 the value of The Paris Architect for this book is manifold. Not only is it another example of a European-set thriller from many in the Studiocanal corpus (I will say more about genre and location across that corpus shortly), but it is also a prime example of Studiocanal attempting to position itself discursively as both talent friendly (to screenwriters in this case, having partnered with the leading organization for supporting this particular creative group) and supportive of European talent in particular. In other words, this was a major branding exercise aimed at reiterating the firm’s self-promotion as a European studio. For reasons that are thus multifaceted and therefore capable of providing us with a more holistic portrait of the company, it is important that to the extent we are able to given the limitations discussed previously we include what Studiocanal has tried to make in the same discussions that analyze what the company has made.

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A conservative content strategy: Remakes/ readaptations and reliance on genre and stardom With all that said, we can now begin to analyze the works themselves and to assess what they tell us about Studiocanal’s impact on world screen culture. As discussed at the outset of this book, one of the structuring assumptions of film and television historiography and general thought in the vein of political economy is that an integrated studio working outside of Hollywood would fundamentally change the industrial and creative landscape of cinema and television. The hope for many decades was, of course, that one or more such studios would arise in Europe, the birthplace of cinema and traditionally thought to be home to a more artistically ambitious form of screen production than that which is found in the Hollywood system. With the arrival of Studiocanal and its contemporaries on the world stage, the question of diversification is no longer speculative and there are now tangible examples that can be examined to see what difference, if any, such studios are making. Such an analysis naturally begins with some discussion of what makes Studiocanal distinct from the Hollywood studios. Instead of finding a litany of substantive differences, however, the more one looks at the broader strategies apparent in Studiocanal’s production practices, we can actually see significant similarities to the Hollywood style of working. As Balio has argued, the majors in recent years have become dependent on well-known intellectual properties for their story ideas, properties which ideally bring with them pre-constituted audiences, and then hope to build franchises around those familiar stories (2013, 25–55). This strategic paradigm has encouraged dependence on creative practices that seek to build on the success of films that have been hits in the past. This can consist of utilizing tried and tested generic models, stars with proven drawing power, remaking older films, making sequels to hits or readapting source material that has provided the basis for successful films in the past.3 It also means that “new” ideas for films—that is, intellectual property that has not yet been used as source material for a film—tend to come from popular books, video games, or other such sources. By utilizing such a strategy, the majors attempt to mitigate the financial risks inherent in the film business, even if audiences and critics often complain that there are few genuinely new ideas at the heart of most contemporary cinema. Far from being an alternative to the studios in this respect, Studiocanal during this period actually emulates much of the presold franchise model of

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Table 4 Studiocanal’s nonlibrary remakes and readaptation projects Film

Release Date

Remake/Readaptation

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Robocop Hard Powder Easy Money The Secret Garden

2011 2014 2018 In Development (Wiseman 2014) In Production

Readaptation4 Remake Remake Remake Readaptation

media production, or at least tries to. Remakes and readaptations are at the heart of its creative strategies and have been since the beginning of the company’s global reemergence in 2006. Chloe, the second film released by company from this period was a remake of the French-language film Nathalie… and in total five of the nine films released internationally by the company between 2009 and 2011 were either remakes or readaptations. The company has not stopped there, instead going on to release thirteen additional remakes, readaptations, and sequels through 2017. Moreover, the company has put at least twenty-four film projects in this vein into development. In some cases, this strategy can be seen as an attempt to make use of the company’s library and therefore can be understood in terms of logics of corporate synergy, but the practice also draws on other source films and television series (see Table 4). It is thus properly understood as a larger creative strategy and not solely a product of synergistic corporate strategy. Even when the company has not directly remade/readapted an existing work, the company has used other strategies of familiarization when making and marketing their films and series, including the preference for using wellknown intellectual properties as source material for films and series. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of Paddington, its sequels, and the planned transmedia franchise discussed in the previous chapter, based as they are on Michael Bond’s long-running and very famous children’s book series. The dedication to capitalizing on intellectual properties runs much more deeply through Studiocanal’s oeuvre and future plans than is indicated by the remake/ readaptation strategy and the acquisition of Paddington. Popular and famous novels form the bedrock of the company’s development slate along with remakes and three brief examples can illustrate just how pervasive this strategy is. From the time of its acquisition by Studiocanal up to 2014, nWave produced two features and a documentary for the distributor, one of which was a sequel to Sammy’s Adventures and the other two being “spec” concepts, that is to say

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“speculation” or wholly original ideas. The company changed direction creatively in 2014 when the production of Robinson Crusoe was announced. This film, which was subsequently released in 2016, bore only a nominal resemblance to the eponymous novel by Daniel Defoe and took as its main characters the talking animals who inhabited the island with the title character. The opportunistic attempt to exploit a known intellectual property is patently clear, and somewhat ironically, it was also unnecessary as the film was released under a different title in the United States (The Wild Life) and elsewhere, negating the literary classic’s place in the marketing of the film. Within Studiocanal’s territories, however, the title was retained and it was also sold to third-party distributors using that title and the associated marketing hook of the classic novel. nWave’s next feature would be The Son of Bigfoot, released in 2017, a film that once again drew on a famous fictional character known around the world, this time drawn from American folklore, an aspect that was played up by Studiocanal’s then Head of Sales Anna Marsh at Cannes in 2016, when the company was looking for distribution partners for the film (Hopewell and Keslassy 2016). The trajectory of nWave’s relationship with Studiocanal is thus one that has seen the Belgian company gravitate toward adaptation, or more aptly given the looseness of the adaptations in question, appropriation of globally familiar characters with built-in audiences. Adaptation also plays a big part of Studiocanal’s television drama production strategies and future plans. Such can be seen in the two companies that form the bedrock of the studio’s TV drama wing: Tandem Communications/Productions and Red Productions. Before becoming Studiocanal’s first television production company, Tandem had based its reputation in the independent television world by using innovative co-financing models to produce miniseries, many of which were adaptations of the works of best-selling authors Nora Roberts and Ken Follett. As discussed in the previous chapter, it was particularly the adaptation of Follett’s Pillars of the Earth in 2012 that made the company’s name internationally. Following its acquisition by Studiocanal, after some forays into “spec” (though, I would argue, very much based on recognizable formulas) concepts for Crossing Lines and Spotless, Tandem has once again returned to Follett to develop a miniseries based on his novel Code to Zero. Adaptation thus seems to set to be important to Tandem’s future output for Studiocanal. The trajectory of Red, on the other hand, is more pronounced and therefore more revealing. At the time of Red’s sale to Studiocanal at the end of 2013, the company had a reputation for original and groundbreaking drama and the company had only made one work based on preexisting sources, the film Blood

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(Nick Murphy, 2012) which was based on the miniseries Conviction (2004), which the company produced (Spicer and Presence, 2016, 16). Since the merger with Studiocanal, however, Red has developed at least three remake projects, including a new version of Quatermass for BBC America, as well as a readaptation of The Portrait of a Lady, the Henry James novel that was adapted as a film in 1996 by Jane Campion. The company has also pursued new adaptations and that end has formed a very close working relationship with American author Harlan Coben, one of the most globally popular mystery/thriller writers working today, having published twenty-nine novels and sold seventy million copies in a variety of languages around the world. Shindler reportedly approached Coben with the idea to adapt one of his books, only to find that the work in question was already optioned to another producer. Nonetheless the two discussed other ideas and ended up making The Five based on Coben’s unpublished story idea that the author had been considering for converting into a novel (“Hot Picks” 2015). This process was repeated with another Coben idea being adapted into Safe, a series released on Neflix and C8 in France in 2018. Even though neither of these stories were adaptations per se, the ways in which they were promoted made as much use of Coben’s name and associated brand of popular fiction as any normative adaptation of popular authors. The partnership between Shindler and Coben apparently worked very well behind the scenes—so much so that Coben even named a minor character in his novel The Stranger (2015) after the producer—and the two continued to work together and to do so they formed a new production company financed once again by Studiocanal, Final Twist, which was discussed in the previous chapter and which seems to be a producer whose very raison d’être will be adapting popular fiction. These developments in Red’s creative strategies thus appear to be deepening and for this reason we can observe that reliance on well-known IP is a strategy deeply embedded across Studiocanal’s corpus to date as well as its future slate for film and television. Such strategies are also to be found on the film side as the company has produced two films and developed a third based on the novels of John Le Carré (Tinker, Our Kind of Traitor [Susana White, 2016], and the in-progress Smiley’s People); three novels by Graham Greene have been adapted or are in the process of being readapted (Brighton Rock, The Third Man, and The Fallen Idol); and the distributor has also set up two projects based on the works of popular novelist Matt Haig (A Boy Named Christmas and How to Stop Time), to name just a few. It is not just from the world of literature that these familiar intellectual properties will come. Didier Lupfer was formerly head of film development and

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production at videogame manufacturer Ubisoft before coming to Studiocanal. Since his arrival, Vivendi carried out the hostile acquisition of videogame manufacturer Gameloft in 2016 and for a time pursued a major stake in Lupfer’s former employer. The strategic rationale for these purchases was stated openly by Lupfer himself and others at Vivendi: to utilize the two companies’ videogames as sources for film and television adaptations while also utilizing Studiocanal’s films and television series as source materials for new videogames (Jaafar 2016a). In this way, as was the case with its literary adaptations, we see Studiocanal following in the footsteps of its Hollywood counterparts, who have long attempted to realize such synergies, while perhaps also trying to catch up with European rivals like Constantin, who have achieved a great deal of commercial success with the Resident Evil franchise. The use of familiar intellectual properties for new projects is not the only way that Studiocanal’s working methods emulate those of the Hollywood studios. Like their American-based counterparts, Studiocanal has been heavily reliant on generic models and star casting. The ways in which genre functions across Studiocanal’s oeuvre are multifarious and understanding them properly means distinguishing between their textual and paratextual manifestations. In the case of the former, when it comes to film, Studiocanal creatively favors a number of genres, particularly those of the romantic comedy, the action film, horror, and family/children’s films. In terms of television, this list is a bit shorter, with procedural crime fiction being far and away the favored form. As we will see in the coming chapters and the extended case study that concludes this chapter, there is a surprising range of the artistic deployment of these genres in specific works. Even when Studiocanal’s films are not so “generic” at the level of artistry, they are nevertheless promoted by the company itself as genre texts. Genre markers are foregrounded in all marketing and promotional materials and particularly in cases where auteur directors are involved. I will have more to say about the relationships between genre and artistic credentials in the discourses surrounding Studiocanal’s work shortly, but for the time being it is easiest to see the discursive importance of genre for Studiocanal when it comes to their middlebrow content. As if to dispel notions of esoteric art cinema, A Bigger Splash, which was produced and directed by Italian art cinema auteur Luca Guadagnino, for example, was consistently spoken of by executives as a “thriller.” This branding was apparent from very early mentions of the film when it was in development (Hopewell 2012b) up to the point that the film was nearing completion and Studiocanal was searching for distribution partners, around which time then CEO Olivier

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Courson was describing the film to the trade press as a “sexy and glamorous thriller” (Hopewell and Keslassy 2014). Similarly, Early Man, which marked the return of Oscar-winning animation writer/director Nick Park to filmmaking, was portrayed, again by Courson, as both an “ambitious” “independent” film and one that “is also very funny” (Jaafar 2015). Genre is in many ways inseparable from questions of stardom and the prominence of stars, particularly male stars in Studiocanal’s creative and marketing practices are one of the distinguishing features of the company’s activities during this period. This is a point that is more prominent in film than television, just as stardom itself has long functioned differently in the two media, even if this seems to be changing in the current “golden age” of television. To be clear, I do not wish to argue simply that Studiocanal has preferences for certain stars, though they clearly have shown such preferences in the past and seem set to continue doing so in the future (e.g., Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Tom Hardy). I will come to this aspect of their production practices later in the book when I argue that generic strategies across the Studiocanal oeuvre led and lead to certain patterns in the casting of the films. Instead, what I am interested in for this part of the book is just that stardom itself is discursively and artistically central to many of Studiocanal’s works. The fact that Liam Neeson has starred in four Studiocanal films to date (with another on the way) or that other actors such as Idris Elba, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy, or Marion Cotillard appear repeatedly across this body of work is less interesting, for now, than the role that their stardom plays in promoting the films. A common strategy for Studiocanal throughout this period has been to unveil their film projects as star vehicles, often for a single, male star and to promote them as such throughout the production and presales process. When, for example, The Commuter was announced as a Studiocanal project in the run-up to the American Film Market in 2015, there were only three creative elements mentioned in the company’s announcement and subsequent trade press stories: the film’s producers (The Picture Company), the film’s screenwriters, and its star, Neeson. Considering that in order to exist at the level of development, a film must have a producer and a writer, it is hardly surprising that these elements were mentioned, but what was discussed most prominently and what was seized upon by the press was of course its star. Subsequently, a close-up of Neeson’s face (seemingly taken from Non-Stop) was utilized on the company’s sales website and in all publicity for the film. Long after a director (Collett-Serra) and other actors were attached to the project, Neeson remained very much the

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“face” of the film, with his face in close-up in a still from Non-Stop remaining the primary image to promote the film for at least a year after the announcement. The company would use a similar strategy to promote an as yet untitled biopic of Ernest Shackleton, a project pitched as a vehicle primarily for star Tom Hardy. In this case, the announcement originally published in Deadline Hollywood in October of 2016 contained even fewer details than that which heralded The Commuter, with no producer mentioned and a screenwriter (Peter Straughan) being described as working on the script (Fleming 2016c). So in other words, all that existed beyond Studiocanal’s involvement, as far as the press knew was an idea for a film and a star attached. While that is an extreme example, individual stars have been the lynchpin of sales (and later marketing) efforts for a range of films, including Unknown, Legend, We Are Your Friends, The Mercy, and many others, whereas Tinker Tailor, Our Kind of Traitor, The Two Faces of January, and others were similarly promoted by virtue of their ensemble casts. Such is the importance of stardom to Studiocanal’s strategies that the stars attached to voice characters in an animated film—Early Man (Eddie Redmayne and Thomas Hiddleston)—were touted publicly ahead of the AFM in 2016, even though many foreign buyers would presumably be dubbing over their voices no matter who the English-language stars had been. Anyone who follows the film industry closely may at this point been objecting that this is standard practice in the film business, particularly in the case of companies with commercial aspirations. This is particularly the case in the Hollywood system where star casting is de rigeur. But herein lies the point: Studiocanal, and many of its European contemporaries, is in this respect emulating the studios. It is thus not surprising to have seen Studiocanal build and nurture close relationships with star-driven production companies such as Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sunny March Productions and Idris Elba’s Green Door Entertainment. Such a strategy mimics what the studios have long done with star-driven production companies in present-day Hollywood—where Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way, to cite just one example, has a preferential deal with Paramount—or going back to the star-based producers which formed United Artists and forever changed how much creative input the studios were willing to give its biggest stars (Balio 1987a). Such privileging of stardom in industrial practice sometimes entails creative consequences—a case in point being the problems that reportedly arose in the making of The Gunman when Sean Penn clashed with producer Joel Silver (Masters 2015); Silver ultimately withdrew from producing the film and Penn himself took on the role along with being

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a credited screenwriter on the film (see case study in Chapter 7). The film received a poor reception from many critics, some of whom blamed the film’s shortcomings on Penn’s indulgence of his own performance and the injection of his personal politics into the project (e.g., Lodge 2015a).

A tale of two brows Even if stardom is central to Studiocanal’s corpus and the promotion thereof, it is important to note that it is not deployed in the same manner for every work. Neither for that matter is the use of authorial discourses, which are also found in the marketing of Studiocanal’s oeuvre, but which vary greatly in their inflection in the campaigns for specific films. The differences here hint at a much bigger divide with Studiocanal’s corpus, one that is fundamental to understanding the company’s contribution to global screen culture during this period. This is a divide which we can call middlebrow and mainstream popular genre production. This divide will structure the following two chapters, but I will also sketch it here to demonstrate the interconnectedness in the company’s output between promotional discourses and creative participants as well as the relationship between these and the textual strategies of genre. As one of the key concerns on the next two chapters is with European identity as it is being represented in Studiocanal’s works, these textual and extratextual generic strategies will also be discussed alongside their representational strategies. These strategies are very coherent within each of the respective tendencies, even if they diverge greatly in comparison to one another. One major point in common between the two tendencies, however, is the industrial strategies used to make each sets of works, strategies that are ideologically pernicious in some senses, but more likely to have a positive impact on the European industries in others. That Studiocanal deployed all of these strategies from very early on in the period after their reemergence as a global power can be seen in their two most important films of 2011: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Unknown. These were the two highest grossing releases of the year for the company at the international box office, earning $82 million and $130 million respectively. Conveniently for this demonstration they also share a number of critical features. First, their plots are both concerned with international espionage, with Tinker being set in the British intelligence services during the Cold War and Unknown’s plot hinging on a clandestine extra-national assassination service that went rogue after the Cold

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War. Second, they both feature famous and even bankable UK-born stars, Liam Neeson in the case of Unknown and Gary Oldman and Colin Firth in Tinker, supported by an array of stars in lesser roles, some of whom have since become bankable in their own right, particularly Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy. Both films also feature important European directors, the Swede Tomas Alfredson in the case of Tinker and Spaniard Jaume Collett-Serra in the case of Unknown. Finally, they are both set in European capitals, London (primarily, as the film’s plot does lead its characters to other cities) in the case of Tinker and Berlin in the case of Unknown. These are not the only similarities between the films, but for the aesthetic terms of analysis I will be pursuing at the outset of this part of the chapter, these categories are the most significant. With the similarities thus established, we can take a brief look at the differences in the articulations of genre, authorship, and stardom in the two films. We can begin with the centrality of genre in both cases, but also the disparity in terms of articulating genre tropes. Both films feature many of what Rick Altman would call the “semantic elements” of the spy/action genres (1999, 216–26). There are plot twists and revelations of betrayal in both films, as there are elements of spectacle, including chases, gruesome violence, and other traditional markers of the genre. The ways in which these elements are utilized—the films’ genre syntax to return to Altman’s metaphor—however, speak to the divergences between the films. In Tinker Tailor, for instance, the betrayals and the revelations thereof are handled in subtle, at times nondramatic, and even anticlimactic ways. We are never told explicitly that Bill Hayden (Colin Firth)—ultimately revealed to be the “mole” in MI6—was the lover of Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong), but there are enough hints for an active spectator to guess as much. This approach relies on the spectator to imagine the intensity of betrayal that Prideaux feels at Hayden’s skulduggery, instead of giving them an explicit scene of confrontation. Similarly, we must infer this as a reason, from either our knowledge of the book or from Strong’s minimalist performance, for Prideaux’s decision to assassinate Hayden in the film’s climactic scene. Another betrayal that is rendered in minimalist terms is Hayden’s affair with Smiley’s wife Anne (Katrina Vasilieva), which is rendered in small gestures such as his stealthy attempts to put on his shoes when Smiley arrives home unexpectedly in a key scene, before being explicitly discussed openly only at the end of the film. One could go on—the quiet, tableau approach to representing violence (often bodies are simply found posed, already having been butchered offscreen by the killers), the distanced camera style, the perfunctory, anticlimactic handling of the revelation of Hayden as the mole—but this would

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just belabor the point about the film’s consistent strategy of genre subversion, a strategy seemingly intent on depriving the spectator of the traditional visceral and melodramatic pleasures of spy fiction and action filmmaking. Unknown on the other hand revels in precisely these conventions of the same genre, with visceral scenes of violence, a twisty narrative punctuated by a melodramatic score at moments of betrayal and revelation and other familiar generic practices. The early scene in which Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) is involved in a car accident which will ultimately cause him to suffer from amnesia is a typical example of the film’s textual strategies. The crash itself is presented in spectacular fashion, as camera placement inside the car coupled with rapid montage attempts to give the audience as close of an experience to the actual crash as possible. Also at work in the sequence is a fast-paced score and frantic camera movements which disorient the spectator in ways that would likewise approximate the effect of being inside a car involved in an accident. Sound and image are then manipulated in a pointed fashion in the middle of the sequence when director Jaume Collett-Serra uses a combination of slow-motion photography and a sudden muting of the soundtrack to allow the spectator to revel in the shock Harris is experiencing before all aural and visual strategies from earlier in the sequence resume, giving the audience the virtual experience being in car hitting the water (see Figure 6). This is followed by Harris hitting his head on the window (with classical manipulation of sound hierarchies to narrate that particular event so as to explain the later amnesia) and then the taxi driver (Diane Kruger) desperately trying to rescue Harris and herself. Such a spectacle-driven and at times (particularly the soundless, slow-motion shots)

Figure 6 Visceral spectacle in Unknown: Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) barely survives a car crash.

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melodramatic textual strategy is consistently deployed throughout the film, including at the moment of the dramatic “reveal” that Liz (January Jones) is not actually Martin’s wife and that he himself was a hired assassin. This is a moment which is interspersed with operatic bursts of music and stylized intercutting to flashbacks which confirm the veracity of Rodney’s (Frank Langella) speech laying out the details in an unequivocal fashion, leaving no work to be done by the spectator. In all possible ways these sequences are thus diametrically opposed in terms of generic style to those of Tinker. This approach to genre can be considered in relation to the films’ respective directors and this element of the two films can in turn be usefully examined in relation to Studiocanal’s twin approaches to screen production during this period. Both Unknown and Tinker feature well-known directors, one could even say auteurs providing we grant that successful genre filmmakers are permitted to receive such an appellation. Tinker was directed by Tomas Alfredson who at the time of the making of the film was renowned for his arthouse treatment of the horror genre in the film Let the Right One In (2008), a film that, similarly to Tinker, undermined the traditional genre tropes of horror but which in so doing created a fresh take on the genre that led to a cult following and ultimately an American remake of the film (Let Me In [Matt Reeves, 2010]). Significantly, Alfredson was, after Le Carré’s novel and the screenwriters, the first major creative element attached to the project by producers Working Title and his involvement in the project acted as “talent bait” that helped to encourage many of the actors to come on board (Bevan 2016). In contrast, Unknown was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, another director with a horror pedigree, but in this case Collet-Serra had made his name in the industry by directing the low-budget horrors House of Wax (2005)—starring Paris Hilton—and Orphan (2008), the latter of which Studiocanal invested in as part of the investments with Joel Silver’s Dark Castle Productions discussed previously. Artistically, both of these were decidedly more conventional in terms of genre strategies than Let the Right One In. Collet-Serra was attached to Unknown before Neeson was, but once the actor came on board on the back of his newfound fame as an action star following the success of Taken in 2008, the star became the promotional focal point for the picture. Such has been the case throughout Collet-Serra’s career where in marketing terms, he routinely plays second fiddle to his stars (often Neeson as it happens, but also Blake Lively in his most recent film The Shallows [2016]) and this is not surprising in the context of genre cinema where stars typically trump directors. Alfredson’s name does

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appear on posters for Tinker and his personal, idiosyncratic style is among the film’s distinguishing features and this art cinema bent for the film is among the factors that led Universal Studios—the parent company of producers Working Title—to pass on fully financing the film (Bevan 2016). This is not to say that stardom and, more precisely, star performance were not important to Tinker, indeed far from it. Tomas Alfredson’s name may be on the posters for Tinker but it was Gary Oldman’s face that took up most of the poster. His performance as George Smiley, with its inevitable comparisons to Alec Guinness’s iconic turn as the same character in the BBC series based on the same novel (1979), was one of the film’s biggest selling points, as were the performances of the rest of the ensemble cast which featured established and (at the time) upcoming British prestige actors such as Colin Firth, John Hurt, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Tom Hardy. Oldman’s nomination for an Oscar for the performance was the culmination of this strategy, cementing the film’s reputation for “quality.” Stardom functions in a completely different way in Unknown, where Neeson’s (at the time) growing reputation for action performance was the center of the film’s marketing strategies, not for his acting skills but for his new star persona. Ironically, Neeson was up to 2008 one of the most prestigious of British/Irish prestige stars, having been nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) among other achievements in his storied career. Indeed, his role in the Studiocanal film Chloe demanded many of his “particular set of skills,” to paraphrase Taken, those being his acting skills. By 2011, however, he was more famous for playing Brian Mills in Taken and it was through this lens that Unknown was promoted and received (e.g. Chang 2011). Even though Unknown does have a supporting cast that at times can rival the prestigious pedigree of Tinker— including famed Swiss star Bruno Ganz, Frank Langella, and others—only Neeson was featured prominently in marketing the film (Meir 2018, 9). As has been mentioned, this was the beginning of a long partnership between Studiocanal and Neeson with Studiocanal making at least three more films with the star (Non-Stop and the forthcoming The Commuter and Hard Powder), making this the most important star relationship thus far in the company’s most important period.

Representing Europe As significant as these key differences between the films are for understanding the impact that Studiocanal’s creative practices are having on central artistic aspects

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of European cinema, there are also important ideological dimensions of the films that require commentary here. One of these is the ways in which the films diverge sharply and that relates to space, place, and national representation. As was said at the outset of this section, both films are set in iconic European capitals, London in the case of Tinker and Berlin in the case of Unknown; Tinker also includes scenes in other European capitals such as Paris and Istanbul. The deployment of these iconic locales, however, varies greatly between the two films. From the outset of Unknown’s narrative, when the Harrises take a taxi from the airport, audiences are treated to repeated shots of many of the most famous landmarks of Berlin, including the Brandenburg Gate (outside of which the characters’ hotel is conveniently located and which also featured in the film’s poster art), Museum Island, the Victory Tower, and the Berlin TV Tower among others. Such a picturesque set of images, often with little or no relation to the film’s plot or themes, collectively lends the film a clichéd, tourist-friendly version of the city, enhancing the film’s escapist qualities. Tinker on the other hand, in a strategy that mirrors its approach to genre conventions, seems determined to undercut the touristic potential of its many locales, even while it nonetheless still features many of these exotic locales. A telling instance of this pastiche-oriented approach comes in the film’s brief segment in Paris, where we see the Eiffel Tower, but only do so through a thick blanket of fog which thwarts traditional touristic pleasure (see Figure 7). Several European locations get similar treatment throughout the film, but the most deglamorized city in the film is London, where we only obliquely see many

Figure 7 A gloomy skyline undermines touristic pleasure when looking at Paris in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

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Figure 8 A cluttered and deglamorized London phone box in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

of its iconic sites such as Westminster (even though the characters meet with government ministers), St. Paul’s cathedral, or others, if indeed we see them at all. When we do see some of the traditional tourist trappings of the city, including the red double-decker buses or red phone boxes, Alfredson finds ways to obscure these and prevent full touristic enjoyment of them or the film as a whole. A bus passes Smiley at one point, but the camera remains at street level, preventing us from seeing the famous second level of that bus. We see Ricky Tarr (Tom Hardy) run to a phone box at one moment, only to see that iconic London trapping covered with stickers and other clutter (see Figure 8). Almost all scenes feature overcast weather and, when indoors, lingering cigarette smoke, visually obfuscating the background imagery and evoking a dreary quality that echoes the film’s world-weary tone and themes. Far from the tourist-friendly equivalent of the Berlin found in Unknown, we have in Tinker a London (and other locales) that is altogether less impressive to the visitor and one presumably that is meant to be closer in terms of verisimilitude to the London of the 1970s. Even if such sights are thusly undermined by the film, it is important to remember that the sights are still there. Nathaniel Deyo has compared the film’s representational strategies—which, according to him, are replete with sequences “larded with sweeping vistas and swooping tracking shots”—unfavorably to the BBC television version, which had a more austere aesthetic (2017, 8). While this claim is somewhat exaggerated in my view—my own points above demonstrate that the film shows a great deal of restraint and a determination to undermine

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visual pleasure—there is indeed a contrast to be observed between the versions and Alfredson’s does feature more exoticism. Deyo misses the mark, however, by not appreciating the relativity of this degree of exoticism. The 2011 version of Tinker attempts to have its proverbial cake and eat it too, showing us the exotic but also distancing the audience from it. More importantly, this contrasts sharply with the approach to similar imagery in Unknown.

Industrial patterns I: Collaborating with Hollywood Having thus established a number of the diametrical qualities that distinguish the two films—qualities that I will go on to argue divide the Studiocanal corpus as a whole—I will end the chapter by discussing some of the important similarities between the films. These are not artistic similarities, which end conclusively after their shared dedication to genres and stars, but instead industrial parallels. Such parallels are important for appreciating the ways in which Studiocanal’s production strategies are affecting the landscape of European cinema and television, particularly when it comes to policy and employment, two crucial issues in that landscape. In short, these concerns as well as those related to representation form vital parts of the kind of critical analysis of transnational production activity as called for by Hjort (2010) and Higbee and Lim (2010), among others. The first aspect of these to comment on here is the industrial relationship between Studiocanal and the Hollywood majors as seen in both films. Like its historical predecessors such as Woodfall Films or Alberto Grimaldi, Studiocanal has repeatedly benefited from and arguably depended on cooperation with Hollywood distribution partners as well as often relying on studio-based producers. By the time Joel Silver’s company Dark Castle made Unknown, the Hollywood veteran had come to rely on non-studio partners to finance his films while Warner Bros. guaranteed to distribute them in the US and international markets. Unknown marked the first time Studiocanal had financed the entirety of one of Dark Castle’s productions (along with public subsidies that will be discussed shortly), but the film’s international success still largely relied upon Warners who were able to open the film at number 1 at the US box office, which helped to market the film in other territories. Tinker was even more of a studio collaboration than Unknown. Beyond the fact that Universal’s subsidiary Focus Features handled the film’s release in the United States and Universal International Pictures released the film in Australia and

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New Zealand, it is also important to remember that the production company that made the film, Working Title, was and is itself a subsidiary of Universal. By 2012, when Working Title’s co-financing pact with Universal and Studiocanal ended, Working Title remained under the ownership of the Hollywood studio, but it was granted the right to shop any projects that Universal did not want to distribute to other financiers. But in practice, this was already happening before 2012 when Studiocanal acquired Tinker, as well as a number of other projects that the Hollywood company had declined to finance. This interrelationship between the producers and the two distribution companies has continued since 2011, allowing Studiocanal to produce seven additional films with Working Title to date, while the producer has developed at least another five projects for the French studio. This has made Working Title the most prolific Studiocanal producer during this period. Beyond the simple fact that Working Title is owned by Universal, we must not discount how important this link was in the case of Tinker, the highest grossing Studiocanal-Working Title production from the period, as Focus’s efforts in the United States and UIP’s work in Australia/New Zealand brought in a combined $33 million of the film’s eventual world box office total of $82 million, a figure representing more than 38 percent of the global draw. Studiocanal’s interdependence with the Hollywood studios is thus amply demonstrated in the cases of these two films and we can see this happening repeatedly across the company’s activities in the period. The company has coproduced two major blockbusters with Hollywood studios during this period: The Tourist, Bridget Jones’s Diary, while also acquiring Sony’s Robocop for all of its territories. It is no coincidence that these constitute some of the company’s biggest global box office hits. Studiocanal has also worked extensively throughout this period with producers based at Hollywood studios. In addition to Working Title, the company made two films with the Universal-based producers Strike Entertainment (The Last Exorcism and its sequel) and who also produced Robocop. Heyday Films, the producers of the single most important film made by Studiocanal during this period, was and continues to be under contract at Warner Bros. Studiocanal has also developed a number of projects with Original Films, the production company headed by Neal Moritz, a producer famed for his work on The Fast and the Furious franchise among other works. At the time Studiocanal started working with Moritz, his company was based at Sony, but it has since moved to Paramount. Even when working with independent producers—those lacking financing deals with Hollywood studios—Studiocanal has often chosen to work

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with Hollywood veterans, including Joel Silver’s former colleagues Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman; Eric Newman after he left Strike Entertainment and Walter Parkes and Laurie McDonald, who were fixtures at DreamWorks in the 1990s and who had long track records with the studios before and since. Such pacts, along with the long-standing Working Title relationship, have allowed Studiocanal to capitalize on the increasing precarity of Hollywood production in which the studios have steadily lowered the quantity of their output in favor of larger bets on big budget “tent poles.” It also means that the European studio has often chosen to work with well-established, American or at least American-oriented producers in the cases of London-based Heyday and Working Title, all of which comes at the expense of giving more opportunities to European-based producers.

Industrial patterns II: “Coproduction” and employment Another key parallel between Tinker and Unknown is that both works are in legal terms European co-productions and numerous benefits spring from that definition. This status, however, belies the fact that in reality very little co-production—in the sense of artistic collaboration between production companies in different European countries—took place. Both films were, of course, completely financed by Studiocanal and each had a single production company that handled the creative dimensions of the making of the film. From these most basic of studio-producer deals, the companies attached services companies and soft money subsidy bodies that were legally listed as coproducers. This was evident with Unknown utilizing Studio Babelsberg, a physical production services company that had invested in Joel Silver’s production companies in 2008. Silver and Studiocanal also attached two subsidy bodies to the production: Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and the German Federal Film Fund, local and national funders, respectively. Working Title and Studiocanal likewise attached several putative coproducers to Tinker, including a specialty company set up just for the film (Karla Films, named presumably after the film’s Russian spymaster), a German coproducer that was actually the production arm of Studiocanal’s German division Kinowelt, and a French company (Paradis Films) that had no apparent involvement in creative matters. Both films actively took advantage of various European production incentives and tax breaks while also becoming more attractive for TV buyers on the continent due to their legal definitions as European films, enabling them to

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fit quota requirements initiated under the Television without Borders5 provisions in the EU. This was a particular hurdle for Unknown which had an American production company at its heart. Far from hiding these clever legal maneuvers, these two and other cases of dubious co-production by the company were openly celebrated in trade press reports (e.g., Hopewell and Jaafar 2010). Besides their manipulation of co-production statutes, another industrial strategy apparent in these two films is their dedication to employing European artists in creative, so-called “above the line” positions. Unknown features a Spanish director and cinematographer, British screenwriters, a British composer, stars from Northern Ireland, Germany, and Switzerland, and a host of other Europeans in key roles. Tinker likewise features a Swedish director and editor, British writers, a veritable who’s-who of British acting talent, a Spanish composer, and a Swiss cinematographer, among others. These creative selections are not coincidental as numerous producers have spoken of Studiocanal’s preference for European creatives in key positions (e.g., Bevan 2016; Newman 2015). Working Title’s Tim Bevan has gone as far as to say that the company works with what seems to be an “informal points system” modeled on those systems utilized by policymakers to determine a film’s nationality (2016). While not every work from this period has European creative elements, executives have repeatedly discussed their desire that the company’s works reflect a “European sensibility” without ever really clarifying what this entailed and presumably counted on these creative decisions to bring such a point of view to the works. This may also (or instead) be a way of ensuring the works meet any conceivable quota requirements that European nations might seek to apply or create in years to come. Whatever the reasons and whatever the outcomes, these decisions have had the net effect of offering many chances to European artists to work in relatively high-budget filmmaking. Such opportunities, which have led to sustainable careers outside of Hollywood, should not be overlooked as they are after all one of the most important benefits of the existence of a European studio, helping to stem the loss of creative talent to other national industries.

Conclusions: Toward a mapping of the Studiocanal corpus With these two archetypal films thoroughly analyzed, we can now turn to the rest of Studiocanal’s output from this period. In so doing, we will see these patterns repeat even as the works themselves diverge in other ways. Moreover,

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the patterns also hold for the television series found in Studiocanal’s corpus, even if there are some medium specific inflections of the elements discussed above, namely an emphasis on writers and showrunners over auteur directors, the influence of commissioning broadcasters on creative packaging and local/ national representation, and others. As with any typology there will inevitably be cases which resist strict binary classification, but on the whole the designations of middlebrow and popular genre production will help us to understand the many effects that Studiocanal’s production activities are having on European cinema and television. The discussion of these begins with the middlebrow branch of the company’s output.

6

Studiocanal’s Mining of the Middlebrow

For long stretches of film history European cinema has been equated with (relatively, for cinema) high culture. This stereotypical construction, which still has currency with audiences, policy-makers, and filmmakers today, holds that European films are inextricably bound up with conventions of art cinema as mapped out by influential theorists such as David Bordwell (1985, 205–33) and Steve Neale (1981). Though not discussed at length in Chapter 2, Studiocanal dabbled in this mode of cinema in the 1990s, particularly in some films it made with French directors such as Louis Malle (Damage [1992]) and Franҫois Ozon (Sitcom [1998]), but these were not the mainsprings of its strategy during the period. As discussed in Chapter 3, art cinema was a much more significant part of the company’s strategies for a while in the early 2000s, before the company abandoned this kind of filmmaking under Sichler’s genre imperatives and the commercial fiasco that was Inland Empire. As part of its reemergence in the late 2000s, Studiocanal continued Sichler’s eschewal of the European tradition of highbrow cinema, and instead focused much of its prestige efforts on middlebrow film and, later, television production. This strategic decision meant Studiocanal was essentially playing catch-up on its American counterparts and PFE who, as has been discussed, had been utilizing this strategy to great commercial and critical effect in the best cases since the 1990s. This chapter will seek to examine the outcomes of Studiocanal’s somewhat belated, by global standards, entry into the arena of middlebrow, as well as the artistic and ideological patterns apparent in this vein of their production. As Studiocanal represents the largest single industrial entity in European cinema and television, their strategies and outcomes can be seen as singlehandedly wielding a great deal of influence over how contemporary European screen culture is in various ways exploiting, continuing, and diverging from its traditional position as the high cultural alternative to Hollywood.

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Defining and historicizing the middlebrow Before delving into Studiocanal’s middlebrow works, it is important to first outline exactly what will be meant by the term in this study and the field as a whole, even if the previous chapter’s discussion of Tinker will have at least indicated what separates this branch of Studiocanal’s production from its popular counterpart. As Sally Faulkner (2016) has shown, middlebrow cultural production generally and film production specifically have generally been the objects of critical and popular hostility. Yet, they paradoxically often win most of the major awards in the film business. Moreover, when they are also commercially successful, as in the cases of films The King’s Speech or Slumdog Millionaire to name just two recent examples, they can also be extremely lucrative for the companies involved due to their relatively low production and marketing costs compared to mainstream genre films. Ideally such films and, increasingly, television series1 are separated from the mainstream by cultural capital yet also potentially crossover into mainstream audiences by virtue of their generic qualities. Such has been documented by scholars of numerous successful middlebrow films such as Howards End (James Ivory, 1993) (Higson 2003, 190– 222) or The Brothers McMullen (Ed Burns, 1994) (Tzioumakis 2012, 150–53) to name just two. If these works depend on their generic makeup to distinguish them from highbrow fare, the cultural capital attached to the works stem from their usage of prestigious literary source material, important historical figures and/or events and the technical skill of the artists involved in the making of the work, primarily the actors and directors, with the latter category aspiring to auteur status. All of the textual and contextual features associated with the middlebrow were found in the case of Tinker in the previous chapter and will be explored across the Studiocanal oeuvre below, but before pursuing these in more detail we must also go beyond defining the middlebrow and should instead also discuss its importance in the past and present state of European cinema. As was apparent throughout the history provided in Chapter 1, the middlebrow strategy has been very much manifest in European cinema, from the popularity of the film d’art in the silent period onward. The continuity of Studiocanal’s contemporary attempts to make middlebrow films with similar strategies at other historical European studios can be seen via a brief comparison between the studio’s 2009 film Chloe and UFA’s The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930).

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Kreimeier describes The Blue Angel as central to UFA’s “determination to synthesize art and commercial success in the ‘prestige film,’” (1996, 189) and there are a number of parallels to be seen between this film and one of Studiocanal’s earliest works in this period. To begin with, both films had dual versions in English and a European language. Even if the production circumstances differ somewhat—with Chloe being a remake of a French film made six years previously and The Blue Angel being shot simultaneously in German and English, with the German version being released first—the attempts to use a local-language template for a global success are similar. Second, both feature auteur directors, Atom Egoyan in the case of Chloe and Josef von Sternberg for The Blue Angel. Even if Von Sternberg was not yet as famous as he would become, he was an established figure in Hollywood at the time (Petro 2009, 259). Finally, and most importantly, for audience appeal both films relied on a mix of eroticism and quality performances, adhering to a middlebrow formula that has been copied throughout film history (Figure 9). The Blue Angel began its life as a star vehicle, though not for Marlene Dietrich, whose ascent to global stardom started with the film. Instead, it was Emil

Figure 9 Rising star Marlene Dietrich and established prestige actor Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel.

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Jannings’s popularity and esteem in Weimar Germany—coming in the wake of his Oscar for 1928’s The Last Command (Josef von Sternberg)—that led to the film getting made (Petro 2009, 256). Petro goes on to show that it was Jennings’s performance along with that of Dietrich that gave the film the cachet to travel successfully. While there is a great deal more to that performance than her eroticism, these elements are part and parcel of the film’s overall generic design as a story ostensibly concerned with moralizing about the ruination of a middleclass man who could not resist erotic temptation. Chloe similarly featured two veteran “quality” actors in (pre-Taken) Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore and they were joined by then rising star Amanda Seyfried in the titular femme fatale role. Without wishing to detract from Seyfried’s acting skills or star qualities, she is not Marlene Dietrich and her performance was subordinated to that of Moore whose character is the central focus of the film. Moore’s character’s selfdestructive obsession with the younger woman mirrors that of Jannings’s Rath. Like Jannings at the time of The Blue Angel, Moore was a star with a reputation for quality performances, having established that cachet via her collaborations with auteur directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson and Todd Haynes among others. Chloe thus, like The Blue Angel, based its textual and promotional strategies around a mix of erotic content and cultural capital via performances and, to a lesser extent in both cases at least at the time of their respective releases, authorial directors. To be clear, I do not wish to suggest that Chloe is as much of an artistic or historic achievement as is The Blue Angel, one of the most canonical European films of the 1930s, but it is important to note how Studiocanal’s first major foray into international film sales and distribution at the beginning of this crucial period in its history began with apparent adherence to precedent when one considers the history of European middlebrow cinema. The company has returned to this particular genre of the obsessive/erotic noir thriller several times, often using auteur directors but always depending on some kind of quality elements. Such can be the case with films like The Two Faces of January (Hosein Amini, 2014) and A Bigger Splash. The erotic thriller is not the only form that Studiocanal’s middlebrow works take and throughout this chapter several distinct variations on the same basic principle of combining highbrow creative elements with genre practices and discourses will be seen. While, as Faulkner (2016, 4) and Bergfelder (2015, 44) have shown, this inbetween-ness on the part of the middlebrow is perhaps the reason for its exclusion from scholarly discourses of European cinema (Bergfelder) and film

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history generally (Faulkner), It is also the root of the middlebrow’s great cultural potential. As Bergfelder points out, middlebrow European films tend to circulate more broadly than their local language popular counterparts and such works are often highly regarded by policy-makers “for their perceived ability to promote and elicit a broader sense of Europeanness” (2015, 45). For these reasons and perhaps also in response to the commercial potential seen in the occasional crossover success like The King’s Speech, there have been a growing number of middlebrow films emanating from the continent since the 1980s and Studiocanal’s latest forays in this arena can be understood within such an institutional context. This activity presents European film and television history with both positives and negatives in terms of artistic, ideological, and industrial outcomes. In order to see this in action, we can begin to look at the ways in which Studiocanal’s corpus during this period has made use of the various markers of cultural capital that distinguish its middlebrow works from popular genre fare, beginning with the figure of the auteur director, a discursive position that has come during the “golden age of television drama” to also be occupied by the figure of the showrunner.

Studiocanal targets the middlebrow I: Auteur directors and showrunners Somewhat ironically, we can best see the importance of auteur directors and showrunners to Studiocanal’s output by examining the habits of its producers, beginning with Working Title. The company has by now a storied track record of producing middlebrow fare as seen, among many other places, in their aforementioned self-branding as purveyors of “intelligent popcorn.” While not all of the films they produced for Studiocanal in this period are middlebrow in terms of the tendencies I am outlining here, the majority of them have been. One of the ways that this can be seen is in their pairing of auteur directors with genrebased scripts. I have already discussed in the previous chapter how important the attachment of director Tomas Alfredson was to Tinker, and a similar emphasis on auteur packaging can be seen in the cases of The Program, a film initially built around famed director Stephen Frears and The Two Faces of January, which was billed from the outset as the directing debut of respected screenwriter Hosein Amini. Looking forward, at least three titles currently known to be in development with the company are following a distinctly middlebrow process of discursively placing the auteur at the center of their publicity in the trade press. Such can be

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seen in the cases of Radioactive, which has Marjane Satrapi of Persepolis (2007) fame slated to direct (Tartaglione 2017c); Thin Skinned Animal, to which Working Title attached festival circuit darling Pablo Trapero, Argentine director of The Clan among other films (Fleming 2017); and Smiley’s People, the sequel to Tinker that will again feature Tomas Alfredson in the director’s chair (Bevan 2016). These strategies work across Studiocanal’s oeuvre, including its work in the family entertainment genre, not typically one associated with middlebrow taste formations. We can, for instance, include the company’s work with Aardman Animations under the umbrella of auteur production. Even if neither of Shaun the Sheep Movie’s directors—Richard Starzak and Mark Burton—are recognized as auteurs, the studio’s house style of stop-motion claymation is recognized as distinctive and idiosyncratic as is their choices of settings and sense of humor. In short, the company’s films evince an auteur sensibility that sets them apart from much other family fare. More negatively, this style and their related tendencies have been seen as limiting their films’ commercial potential, leading Aardman to make more normative CGI works under their Hollywood production deals (see Shaun case study below). The return to its distinctive stylistic tendencies with Shaun thus makes it an auteur work, just as its production of Early Man (2018) with recognized auteur Nick Park, director of the Oscar-winning Wallace and Gromit and the Case of the Were-Rabbit (2005), can more easily, perhaps, be located in this vein due to its writer-director. Another way to observe the importance of authorship in the Studiocanal oeuvre is in the television drama output, particularly in the creative practices of Red Productions and SAM Productions. As discussed in Chapter 3, Red has a long track record of both appealing to large mainstream audiences and winning critical plaudits and can boast an oeuvre that includes seminal series such as Queer as Folk, Clocking Off, and Last Tango in Halifax. In these and other series, we see auteur showrunners Russell T. Davies, Paul Abbott, and Sally Wainwright feature as the primary creative elements in discourses around the respective series. Red’s website at any given time will feature interviews with these or other showrunners such as Dan Sefton (writer of Trust Me), Danny Brocklehurst (writer of Ordinary Lies and The Driver, among others), and Lenny Henry, whose Danny and the Human Zoo (BBC One, 2015) was promoted as a personal, autobiographical work. Looking forward, one of Red’s commissioned works for 2018 includes Monster’s Shrink which is to be showrun by Joann Sfar, acclaimed director of Gainsbourg and other works, while two others are due from Brocklehurst (Come Home and Safe).

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Similar patterns can be seen in the much younger company SAM. The company’s founders include two celebrated showrunners whose works have been at the heart of the “Nordic Noir” boom of the 2010s: Adam Price, creator of political drama Borgen, and Søren Sveistrup, creator of Forbrydlesen/The Killing. The third partner in the founding company is Meta Louise Foldager Sørensen, who up to this point had made a career of producing auteur-driven films, most notably several works directed by Lars Von Trier (Melancholia [2011] and Antichrist [2009] among others) as well as films directed by Nickolaj Arcel, including the Oscar nominated film A Royal Affair (2012). In interviews promoting the company and its work, all three founders have used the language of auteurism as adapted to television drama to proclaim that the company is “writer-driven” (e.g., Meir 2016b). As the company’s first series hit the international market in 2017, the showrunners were front and center, with Price leading the promotional efforts for Rides upon the Storm (Pickard 2017), and Kaspar Barfoed doing the same with his Below the Surface (Granada 2017), despite Barfoed himself not being as reputed as an auteur director up to this point. SAM also has a project in development with HBO Nordic—a sequel of sorts to Pelle the Conqueror—that, if commissioned, will be written and directed by Per Fly, who has been discussed in the Danish press as a television auteur (Redvall 2013, 48). Outside of its larger production deals with these companies, Studiocanal has made a number of one-off projects with auteur filmmakers such as the Coen brothers (Inside Llewyn Davis), Tobias Lindholm (A War), Susanne Bier (Serena), Stefan Ruzowitzky (Deadfall), and Icelandic filmmaker Balthasar Kormakur for his forthcoming television series Katla, as well as maintaining ongoing relationships with filmmakers such as Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash and the development project Let it Fall Back), Amanda Sthers (Madame and Holy Lands), among others. While this book is concerned with the company’s international output, here and in terms of all of the artistic and commercial strategies discussed throughout, we can see similar strategies at work at the local level. So it is that the company has made middlebrow aspirant films with auteur directors such as Cedric Klapisch (Paris [2008], Chinese Puzzles [2013], and Back to Burgundy [2017]), Michel Gondry (Mood Indigo [2013] and Microbe and Gasoline [2014]), Fatih Akin (Goodbye Berlin [2016]), and Ben Wheatley (Kill List [2011] and Sightseers [2012]), among others. This is therefore an entrenched part of the company’s production strategies and as such marks a continuation of sorts from its auteur-centered approach seen in the 2000s. It is also a new

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version of Lev’s (1993) concept of the Euro-American cinema, discussed in Chapter 1, one which retains the discursive and artistic centrality of the auteur director while simultaneously attempting to reverse the auteur-genre formula inherent in the films Lev analyzes to place more emphasis on genre than auteur sensibility. This makes the works less obviously connected to the traditions of art cinema and more aligned with the middlebrow. As we will see later in this chapter and in some of the case studies, this has also made for some difficult productions and perhaps is to blame for some conflicted and ultimately critically and commercially unsuccessful works.

Studiocanal targets the middlebrow II: Quality acting Another middlebrow tendency found across Studiocanal’s oeuvre which can be seen by a brief revisiting of Tinker is the use of quality acting and actors. As was discussed in the previous chapter, besides the authorial presences of Alfredson and Le Carré, the film’s ensemble cast includes a range of previous or future Oscar nominated and winning British actors including Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Tom Hardy. The film was promoted in part on the strength of these performances, particularly Oldman’s, for which the actor was nominated for an Academy Award. Such attention to skillful performance can be found across Studiocanal’s middlebrow oeuvre, with British stars in particular being favored, a tendency that is not altogether surprising given the stereotypical reputation for quality performances associated with actors from that country, a reputation that has featured prominently in British middlebrow films since at least Charles Laughton’s turn in the title role of The Private Life of Henry VIII. Such a dependence on British acting talent can be seen in the casting of Liam Neeson in Chloe, discussed above, or Jude Law’s casting in My Blueberry Nights, but in recent years much of it grows out directly from Tinker. The film’s cast featured four actors who have been cast repeatedly in subsequent Studiocanal films and/or series. Colin Firth has featured three times for the company, in Before I Go to Sleep, Bridget Jones’s Baby, and the 2018 release The Mercy, while also starring in the forthcoming film The Secret Garden (Marc Munden). While his roles in the first two films do not fit into the middlebrow quality performances I am interested in here, his starring role as ill-fated amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst in The Mercy has already been promoted by Studiocanal as one of quality, with Firth himself—billed as an “Academy award winner”—being

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the one of the primary elements of the film that seen in publicity materials at various film markets, alongside “Academy award winner Rachel Weisz” who costars (Studiocanal 2017, 6). Two of Tinker’s younger stars have perhaps the most significant relationships with Studiocanal when it comes to prestige and stardom. Tom Hardy was central to the appeal of Legend, having played both Kray twins in an artistic decision that was fundamental to the film in a number of ways. First, it was crucial to Studiocanal greenlighting the film as Bevan has said it was the actor’s decision to play not one but both twins that elevated the film from being a more standard gangster biopic (2016). Second, it was key to the marketing of the film. The first publicity still released to support the sale of the film to distributors was of a composite image of Hardy in costume as both twins and this set the pattern that the rest of the marketing would follow. Finally, the film’s distribution strategy particularly outside of the UK (where the Krays were famous historical figures) was set up around Hardy’s performance and the critical reception thereof. In all major markets, including Studiocanal’s, the film was released in the traditional “awards season” surrounding the end of year (2015) and the early months of the new year (2016), hoping to coincide with the announcement of the Academy Award nominations. The strategy failed commercially when the film failed to get any traction in the Academy Awards or any other major awards, and distributors, again including Studiocanal, limited the film’s release, making it only a major hit in the UK where it received a wide opening release and where it was seen as a box office hit. All told, the film drew about two thirds of its total global box office receipts from the UK market alone (approximately $28 million out of $43 million total). The other major project that Hardy has worked on with Studiocanal, as discussed in the previous chapter, does not yet have a title that has been made public, in fact very little is known about the film at all except that it is a biopic of Richard Shackleton and that Hardy is attached to star in that role. Such is Hardy’s star persona and reputation for memorable performances that his casting in the film is all that it needed to be newsworthy and therefore viable for studio and star. The final key star relationship that has emerged out of Tinker is the most important emerging middlebrow star relationship for the studio, that being with Benedict Cumberbatch. Cumberbatch’s personal star has risen dramatically during this period following the global success of the TV series Sherlock in which he stars. His first role in a Studiocanal film was actually a bit part in the local UK production Four Lions (Chris Morris, 2010), but following his role as

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Peter Guillam in Tinker, he went on to star in The Imitation Game, which was a lucrative acquisition for Studiocanal in 2014, having grossed $31 million in the UK and France for the company after the film was successful in generating Oscar buzz, including a nomination for Cumberbatch himself for Best Actor. Since then, as was discussed in Chapter 3, Cumberbatch formed Sunny March, a film and television production company as his star power has continued to grow, leading him to play the titular character in the Marvel superhero film Dr. Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2016) and to reprise the character in various other films in the Marvel universe. Sunny March has so far made one television drama, The Child in Time, and developed at least three other film and television projects, all of which Cumberbatch is set to star in. Two of these are films that Studiocanal is developing: a war film entitled The War Magician and a historical drama entitled How to Stop Time in which the actor is set to play a character who lives for hundreds of years without physically aging. Additionally, Sunny March has another TV project in the works at the time of this writing: Patrick Melrose, a miniseries commissioned by US pay-television network Showtime and Sky Atlantic. Several middlebrow elements are to be found across this body of work, not the least of which is prestigious source material. Three of the projects are based on acclaimed novels and the fourth (War Magician) is a Second World War biopic. I will have more to say about prestigious source material generally for Studiocanal in the next section, but for now, we can return to the performances Cumberbatch gives or is expected to give in some of these works. At the time it was announced The Child in Time was described as “the lyrical and heartbreaking exploration of love, loss and the power of things unseen” in which Cumberbatch’s character must overcome the disappearance of his daughter (Tartaglione 2017b), thus clearly highlighting the emotive qualities that Cumberbatch’s performance would feature. The film was subsequently received in these terms, with Cumberbatch’s performance being the main focus of most reviews. In the forthcoming drama Patrick Melrose, Cumberbatch’s character is described as embarking on a “harrowing odyssey from a deeply traumatic childhood through adult substance abuse and, ultimately, toward recovery” (Andreeva 2017). Cumberbatch’s performances are thus set to continue to feature on the Studiocanal slate as part of the company’s general middlebrow strategy. Going beyond the case of Tinker, it can be observed that the use of ensemble, “quality” casts is not limited by any means to that film nor are its artistically ambitious performances in the Studiocanal oeuvre limited to the film’s alumni. Variations on this formula in this period include A Bigger Splash which featured

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four leads, but which generated most of its buzz from the performances of Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton. Others included Our Kind of Traitor (Ewan McGregor, Damian Lewis, Stellan Skarsgård, and Naomie Harris); Inside Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac, Carrie Mulligan, Justin Timberlake); Serena (Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Rhys Ifans; see case study below); and The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance, 2012) (Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, Ray Liotta). We can also include in this discussion a number of Studiocanal’s middlebrow television series, including The Last Panthers (Sky and Canal Plus, 2015) whose multinational cast included Samantha Morton, John Hurt, Tahar Rahim, and Goran Bogdan and Baron Noir whose French cast includes comedian Kad Merad in a dramatic role along with Niels Arestrup and Anna Mouglasis. But the clearest examples of ensemble television dramas come from those produced by Red Productions. These include Ordinary Lies, whose narrative structure entails a rotating focus on six different workers in each season’s workplace; Last Tango in Halifax, which is centered around four lead characters played by Sir Derek Jacobi, Anne Reid, Sarah Lancashire, and Nicola Walker; and Scott and Bailey with its trio of detectives played by Suranne Jones, Lesley Sharp, and Amelia Bullmore. Besides the ensemble pieces there are numerous examples from this period of Studiocanal middlebrow works which are, like Legend, commercially and artistically built around one central quality performance. In the realm of television drama, Happy Valley is perhaps the most glaring example as it relies on the acclaimed central performance of Sarah Lancashire (see case study below). In terms of Studiocanal films, we can find this strategy at work in films such as We Are Your Friends which offered teen idol Zac Efron a chance to establish himself as a quality actor. Other examples include Gold (Stephen Gaghan, 2016), which hoped to create Oscar buzz around the central performance of Matthew McConaughey; The Program, which sought to do the same with star Ben Foster; and Macbeth which was crafted around the performances of Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard; as well as many others.

Studiocanal targets the middlebrow III: Prestigious source material One final way of targeting the middlebrow that is important to discuss here is Studiocanal’s use of adaptation. As discussed in previous chapters, adaptation is

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commercial and creative strategy used across the studio’s production activities and functions in a similar way to remakes. This is a common strategy for an international studio to utilize and the Hollywood majors have been doing so throughout their history, after all, the ability to procure popular source material with presold audiences is one of the advantages of the possessing the financial strength of an integrated studio. Hence the major push for popular fictions such as the Harry Potter novels or Marvel Comics by the Hollywood majors. Studiocanal has pursued similar strategies, albeit on a smaller scale, purchasing and optioning numerous works, most notably all the rights to Paddington the Bear following the success of the 2014 film. But the exact cultural and commercial qualities of source material varies widely of course and in their pursuit of the middlebrow audience, Studiocanal has used particular sources for their films and series, sources which include critically respected fiction as well as historical events. As was seen in Chapter 1, European usage of the adaptation of its literary traditions into prestigious films is as at least as old as the aforementioned film d’art, and Studiocanal has continued this tradition somewhat with an adaptation of Macbeth and the development of a series based on the Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule for the French studio. In general, Studiocanal has pursued middlebrow adaptations that draw upon the work of more contemporary novelists who are themselves middlebrow in terms of their audience appeal and critical reputation. These include works by Patricia Highsmith whose works were initially received in the 1950s and 1960s as popular thrillers but which are now seen as having depths in terms of character psychology and themes of transgressive sexuality that set her work apart from normative popular fiction. Studiocanal has thus far been a part of two (historically set) adaptations that in different ways attempt to utilize her novels for both their entertaining and intellectual qualities: The Two Faces of January and Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015). Similarly, John Le Carré’s reputation for revisionist, insightful, and politically charged spy fiction has grown throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and his work has been the basis for two Studiocanal films (Tinker as well as Our Kind of Traitor), with a third in development (Smiley’s People). Finally Graeme Greene, whose writings were bestsellers while also being remembered as some of the most critically acclaimed of the twentieth century has had one film (re)adapted Studiocanal as a historical piece (Brighton Rock), with two others in development (The Fallen Idol and The Third Man). Other recent projects involving middlebrow authors include works based on books by Ian McEwan (The Child in Time), Matt Haig (A Boy Called

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Christmas and How to Stop Time), and Edward St Aubyn (Patrick Melrose), among others. As will be seen in the next chapter, this selection of source material varies greatly in terms of taste from the works on the popular genre side, which despite their apparent differences are nonetheless routinely based on preexisting material including literature. Historical personages also constitute a major source of adaptation for Studiocanal’s middlebrow works and development projects. We can thus find a number of biopics—often discussed as one of the most typically middlebrow of genres (Vidal 2014, 2–3; see also Brown 2014)—well represented in the Studiocanal corpus. Works of this kind include Legend, The Look of Love, The Program, The Lost City of Z (about explorer Perry Fawcett) and documentaries such as Eight Days a Week and Love, Marilyn (Liz Garbus, 2012). Among development projects in this vein are The Great Pretender (about real-life fraudster Roy Tempest), Radioactive (about Marie Curie), the aforementioned War Magician, and the untitled Shackleton biopic. Beyond the biopic, the company has also developed a number of projects based on famous episodes of history including Hindenburg, about the famous crash of the airship; The Siege, about the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack; The Last Battle about a real battle late in the Second World War; and a number of others. Such usage of history is largely in keeping with middlebrow conventions at other companies during recent years, The King’s Speech, The Crown (Netflix, 2017–), and The Theory of Everything (James Marsh, 2014) would be just a couple of recent hit films and series in this mold. All of these works, whether from Studiocanal or others, by virtue of their attempts to engage with history in ways that are accessible to mainstream international audiences, carry with them the potential to foster greater popular understanding of European culture and history, speaking to the potential discussed by Bergfelder (2015, 44), and others for the middlebrow to act as important works of Europeanness.

Space, place, and representation in Studiocanal’s middlebrow works This discussion of the progressive cultural potential of the middlebrow is an opportune moment to return to this book’s concern with European representation. I will thus here conclude this chapter with some discussion of the representational strategies to be found in the middlebrow works. As was

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hinted at in the lengthy discussion of Tinker and Unknown in Chapter 4, these are very distinctive from the representations of the continent found in the lowbrow works. This, in general, is a strategy closely related to taste formations as middlebrow audiences typically expect something different from the generic American setting and similarly favor views of other nation that go “deeper” than tourist locales and come closer to “authentic” cultural representations. Thus even in the case of the heritage film, a genre long associated with middlebrow tastes and which typically includes the usage of touristic locations, particularly the “heritage” properties that give the genre its name, there is typically a great deal of effort made to photograph these in realistic ways. Hence the preference for location shooting, natural lighting, and other representational strategies associated with art cinema practice, but which are found throughout the heritage cycle of the 1980s and 1990s (Higson 2016, 233). In keeping with this general tendency in middlebrow cinema, even when Studiocanal’s middlebrow works from this period are not set in Europe, there are nonetheless similar representational strategies to be seen in the degrees of specificity and the handling of space and place. Such can be seen for instance in Inside Llewyn Davis’s approach to representing the oft-idealized Greenwich Village of the early 1960s. This portrait dwells on the poverty of musicians, the literal and metaphorical coldness of the place and time and ends just as the locations were becoming famous, as a young Bob Dylan plays his first gig in a nightclub in the neighborhood. Similarly, We Are Your Friends actively works against the stereotypical glamour of life in Los Angeles by setting its story in the Simi Valley, traditionally a working-class part of the city. Moreover, the film turns this separation between the two LA’s into a central theme as its protagonists struggle against prejudice from the city’s elite as aspiring DJ Cole (Zac Efron) tries to climb the city’s social ladder. Another, related, strategy is seen in the way Deadfall and Serena, for example, use their respective landscapes as virtual characters in the films, to heighten narrative tension as well as attempting to develop characters through their relationship to the barren, snow-covered plains of Deadfall, or the untamed forests of Serena. In all cases, place is more than just a backdrop and while there are degrees of exoticism in all cases, the works at least attempt to go beyond such treatment of location. While Studiocanal’s American-set middlebrow films help to demonstrate the company’s representational tendencies, the most pertinent examples from Studiocanal’s oeuvre for this study are of course its European-set examples. As was hinted at in the previous discussion of Tinker, these make up a bigger

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portion of the company’s output than the American-set works. There is no better example of regional specificity in all of Studiocanal’s output, or arguably in the recent history of British television than in Happy Valley. This series has been (rightfully) acclaimed for its usage of West Yorkshire’s Calder Valley as a distinct part of the world and a distinct character in the drama. The series is replete with landscape shots that are realistic in terms of composition but which are also very expressive, often being used to develop characters or themes (especially by contrasting natural beauty with manmade evil, for example) or performing any number of other functions that go beyond strict narrative economy. The relationship between the show and this particular place also goes beyond what is seen on the screen. Such is the show’s discursive association with the actual region that its producers and creative team aided in fundraising efforts when the actual Calder Valley was affected by floods in 2015. This is not the only time that producers Red have made such a regionally oriented show. They are famed within British television production for what Andrew Spicer and Steve Presence call their “rooted regionalism” in the north of England (2016, 16). The company made its name in this regard with Manchesterset series such as Clocking Off and Queer as Folk and has continued making northern English–set series under the aegis of Studiocanal, including Last Tango in Halifax, Scott and Bailey, Cucumber, and the first season of Ordinary Lies, among others. The company has also branched out into other parts of the UK with similar representational specificity, as seen in the Midlands-set Danny and the Human Zoo, the Welsh-set second season of Ordinary Lies and Trust Me, which was partly set in Scotland. (This is not to say, however, that all their series in the contemporary period have had such a sense of place, as will be seen in the next chapter.) A prominent representational strategy seen throughout Studiocanal’s middlebrow production can be usefully compared to that seen in Tinker, which entails using a well-known location in ways that undercuts the more conventional ways of seeing that place. Just as Tinker did this with London and other European capitals, A Bigger Splash deglamourizes Pantelleria, one of the world’s most glamorous types of locations: A Mediterranean island chocked full of natural beauty and playground to wealthy tourists. Against this seemingly beautiful backdrop, four tourists (played by Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, Matthias Schoenaerts, and Dakota Johnson) awkwardly vacation together while tensions, sexual and otherwise, simmer between them. The film’s version of Pantelleria includes the island’s many touristic locales (secluded villas, quaint

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towns, breathtaking views of the Mediterranean Sea, etc.) and also less pleasant aspects of the island and its history. The boorish Harry (Fiennes) at one point insists on telling the other characters about the island’s history as a slave-trading port and then denounces the abuses of history on the island proclaiming “Europe is a graveyard” while urinating on some of the volcanic rocks that are distinctive topographical features of the island. The film also shows the island struggling to cope with the influx of migrants from Northern Africa as their appearance on the island intersperses the film’s narrative. Rather than taking a safe liberal view of this crisis, the film is merciless toward European liberalism by having the seemingly well-meaning and sympathetic characters (vis-à-vis the refugees at least) direct police attention to the refugees as likely suspects for the murder of Harry, a crime which two of them know full well was committed by Paul (Schoenaerts). But Paul escapes any consequences for the crime as the island’s police are star struck by Paul’s pop singer girlfriend Marianne (Swinton) and all too prone to believing that the Africans are criminals. Pantalleria is thus, according to the film, an outwardly beautiful island that is corrupt at its core. Echoing the strategies of A Bigger Splash and Tinker in undercutting famous locations with varying degrees of political pointedness and artistic ambition, other Studiocanal works make similar iconoclastic usage of European backdrops. These include Legend, which focuses on the poorer, rougher East End of London. The Program and Our Kind of Traitor, much like A Bigger Splash and (in keeping with the Moroccan-set The Two Faces of January) renders the traditional sites of wealth and power in Europe as teeming with corruption and various other kinds of abuse of power, even as they retain the spectacular visual beauty that is so attractive to audiences. The Last Panthers blends the deglamourizing tendencies of Tinker and Legend with the politically charged critique of sites of wealth and power by showing us, in turn, the deprived areas of Marseille and Eastern Europe and the decadent wealth and power of London-based politicians and corporate executives, all of which are captured in grainy low-light images. Macbeth does similar things at the thematic level while pushing the artistic envelope to a degree that even surpasses the already very ambitious A Bigger Splash as director Justin Kurzel utilizes a range of Highland locations and landscapes as well as many color filters and visual effects to make the traditionally tourist-friendly space into an abstract, hellish realm of murder and mayhem. This is in keeping with the much more stylistically restrained but also gruesomely violent Midnight Sun (Canal Plus and SVT, 2016), which among other dark images includes the sight

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of a naked man being eaten alive by arctic wolves against the scenic backdrop of a snow-capped mountain in northern Sweden.

Of fishes and fowls: Balancing artistry and audiences in Studiocanal’s middlebrow works With all Studiocanal’s middlebrow works, there have been equal efforts textually and promotionally to underscore the works’ generic elements and the balancing act required by these efforts has not always been easy. A number of these have undergone long periods of reshooting and behind the scenes wrangling between studio and auteur. The most glaring of these was Serena which saw three years lapse between initial photography and its release in 2014 (see case study below), but The Program was also “a difficult film to land” according to producer Tim Bevan and spent a long time in limbo as well, with reshoots being carried out during a two year period following the end of principal photography until its release date (2016). While reshoots are standard practice in Hollywood, the problems in each of these cases can be traced back to creative differences with auteur directors. Frears himself has spoken of the difficulties he had finding a narrative structure that worked for him and the studio for The Program: “There is a lot of pressure to make a biopic but that has never interested me. . . . The problem is that I had no idea how to structure this film” (quoted in Pritchard 2015). For her part, Serena director Susanne Bier has spoken of feeling confused by the artistic direction that Studiocanal and co-production partner 2929 wanted to take on the film, saying that “there was not a clear understanding of the kind of movie we were making” (Keslassy 2016). The result in both cases according to multiple critics (including this one) were films whose apparent confusion behind the scenes is mirrored by artistic confusion between the impulses associated with genre—the biopic/thriller in the case of The Program, the period melodrama in the case of Serena—and those associated with art cinema: complex, flawed, and unlikable characters, a pessimistic worldview and narratives that are often more about character than plot. A common critical complaint about The Program, for example, was that the ending was already well known given the notoriety of Lance Armstrong and that the film did not do enough to either invest this well-known story with drama nor to give new insights into the well-known character (e.g., Lodge 2015b). In other words, the film was neither fish nor fowl, neither art cinema

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nor genre cinema. Whereas middlebrow cinema seeks to be both and neither simultaneously, these films and others have suffered from the effort of trying to achieve this balance. This has happened repeatedly across Studiocanal’s oeuvre with specific examples ranging from films that were too cerebral and “arty” to please popular tastes despite marketing that promised such accessibility—for example, Chloe, A Bigger Splash—to works that are too generic in their design to meet the expectations of more discerning audiences, such as Midnight Sun (Lawson 2017), Our Kind of Traitor, or Deadfall. Successful middlebrow production aspires to achieve a modicum of both critical and commercial success, with the two being interrelated as good critical word-of-mouth drives popularity, but Studiocanal has thus far not often seen this combination. As a group Studiocanal’s middlebrow films have performed very poorly commercially, with Shaun the Sheep Movie being the only one to reach $100 million at the international box office, and the Coen brothers directed Inside Llewyn Davis and Tinker and Legend achieving various degrees of box office success ($35 million, $82 million, and $43 million, respectively). The years 2014–16 were particularly difficult for films in this mold with Serena (under $5 million), The Two Faces of January ($10.5 million), and The Program (under $2 million) struggling to find audiences. All three were also greeted by reviews that were tepid at best and scathing at worst, interestingly with part of the problem for some critics being the films’ failure to balance artistic and generic ambitions (see Serena case study). Even when the films have received critical praise, as has been the case with A Bigger Splash and The Lost City of Z (2017), this has not translated into widespread audience interest ($7.5 million and $17 million respectively at the international box office) or nominations for prestigious awards. Even with some of the relative successes in terms of box office, critical plaudits did not come in the volume expected for Legend (Hardy did not receive any nominations for his dual role) or Inside Llewyn Davis, which was likewise empty-handed during awards season, despite some nominations at least for major Golden Globes. Despite being the biggest commercial success of this vein of production to date and receiving an Oscar nomination, Shaun the Sheep Movie underperformed at the US box office where the film’s idiosyncratic elements likely impeded its commercial viability (see case study below). Middlebrow cinema has thus been a difficult business for Studiocanal during this period, just as it has been for many of its competitors during the 2010s, with many observers seeing the audiences and artists of this particular branch of film production migrating to television. Given such larger shifts, it is perhaps

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not surprising that Studiocanal’s middlebrow television has been decidedly more successful for the company. Happy Valley is among the highest rated and critically decorated British TV series in recent memory, while Last Tango in Halifax, Scott and Bailey, and Ordinary Lies have likewise commanded high ratings and critical respect. The company’s Danish series have followed suit, with Rides upon the Storm winning a number of awards at MIPTV 2017, while Below the Surface was acquired by BBC4, something of a marker of international critical esteem for non-English language series (Mazdon 2016, 192–93). Baron Noir rode a wave of critical plaudits to international sales into eighty markets worldwide. The company has a number of further middlebrow television projects in the works, including the aforementioned series from Sunny March as well as others. For Studiocanal, the future of middlebrow production at the company may be on television rather than on cinema screens, just as many see the future of middlebrow fiction production generally in the “golden age” of television drama.

Case study: Shaun the Sheep Movie (Richard Starzak and Mark Burton, 2015) With over $100 million at the international box office, nearly $47 million within Studiocanal’s distribution territories (the third most ever for the company at the time of writing, after Paddington and Paddington 2), an Oscar nomination and a bevy of positive reviews, Shaun the Sheep ranks as the most accomplished of the company’s middlebrow films to date. As such it is a vivid example of many of the best attributes of Studiocanal’s work during this period and an illustration of the studio’s potential to make positive interventions in the global media landscape, not the least of which is to provide opportunities for European producers seeking to work outside the Hollywood system. The film was made with British producers Aardman Animations, who had just exited the second of the company’s exclusive deals with Hollywood studios. This was a production deal with Sony Animation, which ran from 2007 to 2012, which originally replaced a similar deal with DreamWorks Animation which had run from 2000 to 2006. Both of these deals followed similar trajectories that saw the company produce acclaimed stop-motion features—with Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the WereRabbit winning an Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2006 and The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (Peter Lord and Jeff Newitt, 2012) being nominated for the same award—as well as more conventional CGI works such as Flushed

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Away (David Bowers and Sam Fell, 2006) and Arthur Christmas (Sarah Smith and Barry Cook, 2011). But both pacts ended unhappily as the company’s films failed to meet the commercial expectations of their studio partners. DreamWorks ended their deal after incurring heavy losses on Wallace & Gromit and the CGI feature Flushed Away (Kemp 2007).2 In addition to the financial losses, Flushed Away received a poor critical reception as many felt that Aardman had changed their unique style and sensibility to please their Hollywood partners. Aardman moved on to work with Sony and again faced difficulties working with the constraints and expectations of their Hollywood partners, with the CGI animated feature Arthur Christmas faring particularly poorly in commercial terms—grossing $146 million but on a budget of over $100 million—even if there was in this case at least critical esteem for both films made with Sony. Reflecting on the two Hollywood pacts, Aardman chairman David Sproxton has cited the company’s lack of appeal among the audiences of middle America as the reasons for their unsustainable relationships with the two studios (2015). For these reasons, Aardman sought to partner with a studio more focused on the European market just as Studiocanal was looking to expand into children’s entertainment (work had recently begun on Paddington when Studiocanal greenlit Shaun). Shaun was the first project set up between the two firms and this immediately signaled Studiocanal as an alternative to its Hollywood counterparts as Sony had turned down the project during their time working with Aardman (Sproxton 2016). Even if it was based on an already successful television series of the same name, Shaun represented a risk in terms of international, especially American, marketing. Being wholly without dialogue—already a challenge to young viewers unaccustomed to not hearing speech in films—the film lacked the kind of celebrity voice cast typically used to promote animated films. Moreover, though it is shown in over 100 markets around the world, the television series remains of limited popularity in the United States and some other key markets such as China. Instead its core audience is found in Britain and Germany where its two main commissioning broadcasters—the BBC and ARD—are based. Added to this is the film’s idiosyncratic sense of humor and rural English setting, both of which are distinctive elements of the Aardman formula, but which have again and again proven to be not commercial enough for the Hollywood studios. Studiocanal agreed to finance the film for under $25 million (Hopewell 2015b)—the lowest Aardman budget to date—and otherwise did not meddle in Aardman’s creative process. Sproxton has said they were the least intrusive creative partner the company has had during its forays into feature film

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production (2015). Perhaps because of this creative freedom, the film was the most accomplished and best received feature produced by the company since Wallace & Gromit, with enthusiastic critical characterizations such as “shear genius” (Hammond 2015; pun intended in original) and “an ingenious, touching and very funny” (Keough 2015) being typical critical comments on the film. While the commercial reception of the film ended up in the smallest international box office of any Aardman film to date ($106 million in total), with its smaller budget the film ended up being profitable and this helped to make it the first Aardman property to receive a feature-length sequel, which is due in 2019. The film also established a working relationship between studio and producer that would lead to the 2018 film Early Man. We can see all the signature attributes of Studiocanal’s middlebrow practices at work in Shaun. It is a film with a distinct, idiosyncratic authorial style, one that threatens even to be a commercial impediment in a medium that typically avoids challenging its core audience. Moreover, the film was a standout in terms of its throwback claymation style during an era in which CGI has become all but de riguer in children’s animation. Even though the film makes a running joke of its generic setting—the sheep travel to “Big City” and this apparent placelessness is used as the source of numerous jokes—the film has a degree of spatial and national specificity that distinguishes it from other children’s films and even some previous Aardman features (see Figure 10). The iconography of rural

Figure 10 Idiosyncratic humor and recognizable yet non-clichéd urban British settings in Shaun the Sheep Movie.

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England is unmistakable, from its rolling hills to its double-decker bus driving on the left side of the road and its jumper-clad ginger-haired farmer. Even more telling of the film’s roots, however, is its depiction of the city which manages to be very British without ever resorting to the clichéd iconography of London, which are more typical of internationally oriented films and which will be seen in other Studiocanal films. Writing in The Telegraph critic Robbie Collin sums up Shaun’s representational qualities when he says the film “takes place in an instantly recognisable present-day Britain, with the fingerprints and scuff marks intact. It’s a land of market squares and charity shops, bus stations and café lattes, beards, Internet memes and songs by M People. . . . In short: it’s home” (2015). One of the film’s many achievements is thus its ability to evoke England with such specificity while simultaneously making it universally accessible (the film’s eschewal of dialogue is just the most obvious way of doing this). Similarly it is very much the work of distinctive artistic sensibility while still being very broadly entertaining. In other words, it is the consummate middlebrow film.

Case study: Happy Valley Happy Valley is the most critically respected series among all of Studiocanal’s middlebrow television output, with each of the two seasons that have been released thus far receiving rapturous reviews and the show subsequently making it on to numerous “Best of ” lists in the UK and throughout the English-speaking world. These accolades are complemented by numerous awards bestowed on the show, its writer Sally Wainwright and its star Sarah Lancashire. It has also consistently drawn high ratings, making it one of the BBC’s most popular dramas each of the years it has been broadcast. Partly owing to its distinct regional setting, many see it as the epitome of domestically oriented British television drama. In fact, the drama is routinely cited as the kind of “local” British content that needs to be protected during the contemporary golden age of television in which rising costs are requiring producers to increasingly look for foreign partners. Voicing some of these concerns writer Stephen Garrett told a meeting of policy-makers in 2017 that “the cultural specificity of shows such as Happy Valley are increasingly hard to support because they’re of zero interest to international partners” (quoted in Grater 2017). Garrett is overlooking the imbrication of producers Red within a French studio while also not acknowledging that the show is actually very popular

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Figure 11 A powerful performance from Sarah Lancashire and the creative usage of the Calder Valley landscape are among the middlebrow elements of Happy Valley.

overseas, despite its thoroughly distinct cultural setting. The show has been sold to broadcasters and streamers in numerous international territories including the United States, Latin America, India, and South Korea, among other countries on Netflix and broadcasters in Australia, France, and elsewhere. Happy Valley is thus a very global show and perhaps offers an aesthetic blueprint for combining global and local success. These outward signs of success are matched textually by exemplary middlebrow production that combines all of the elements outlined in the chapter with the exception of not being an adaptation or historically themed (Figure 11). Middlebrow production begins with genre and in that respect Happy Valley is very much rooted in the gritty, female-centered variation on the police procedural that has proved very popular in recent years. Like her counterparts Sara Lund (Forbrydelsen), Saga Noren (Bron/Broen), or Robin Griffin (Top of the Lake), Catherine Cawood (Lancashire) is an outwardly tough but emotionally traumatized, brilliant but difficult at times socially difficult female detective. Like her counterparts in other series, she too must solve gruesome crimes that overlap with her own personal problems. Besides following that by now familiar formula, season one of the series also owes parts of its plot to the famous Coen brothers’ film Fargo (1996) as meek accountant Kevin Weatherill (Steve Pemberton) arranges a kidnapping that goes shockingly wrong in ways that recall the botched kidnapping organized by the equally hapless Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) in the Coens’ film. This is not to say that at any point does Happy Valley feel derivative and its ability to absorb these influences without

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being limited by them can be largely explained by its usage of quality elements, not the least of which are the landscapes and setting discussed above and which are so central to the show’s ironic title and view of rural England generally. The creative team involved in the series simultaneously demonstrates the usage that Studiocanal’s middlebrow works make of authorship and quality star performance. Sally Wainwright’s role in the drama cannot be underestimated and, ironically given the traditional association between auteurs and film directors, it is in her contribution to a television series that in many ways best exemplifies the emphasis placed on authorship in the Studiocanal middlebrow oeuvre. Wainwright’s personal interests in terms of feminism and regional identity (she herself is from Yorkshire, having been born not far from the Calder Valley) are clearly displayed in the show itself, as they have been in all of the recent series she has written. Interviews with the writer have accompanied have also featured prominently in the publicity campaigns for both seasons of Happy Valley, a promotional strategy drawn directly from the auteur marketing of films and virtually unheard of in television drama before the contemporary “golden age” of the artform, which has initiated an auteur cult around showrunners. The other key creative element of the series is its star Sarah Lancashire who has received nearly universal critical and popular acclaim for her performance as Catherine Cawood. Reviewers have greeted her performance with too many superlatives to list here, and she has received nominations and awards for her work on the show, including nominations for BAFTAs. This elevation to a genuine star has been dramatic but perhaps not together unexpected for the actress who has had a long career as a respected supporting actor on many shows, including long-running soap opera Coronation Street (ITV, 1960–), and even a central one in the equally popular Red drama Last Tango in Halifax, for which she received a BAFTA for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in 2014. But the reception of Happy Valley has been on a different level, with almost all of the reviews focusing on her performance over those of the rest of the cast. Unsurprisingly, she is also the focal point of all of the show’s visual promotional efforts, as posters and cover art typically feature her alone. The show’s all-around success, with audiences and critics in the UK and abroad, is a symptom of its ability to combine the various elements that typify middlebrow production. Happy Valley is thus the ideal that Studiocanal and many others in the contemporary screen industries aspire to: a series that is distinctive yet familiar; compelling at intellectual, emotional, and visceral levels; clearly rooted in a specific place and time while nonetheless speaking to global

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audiences; one equally capable of widespread popularity while still having the potential to act as a prestigious calling card for all involved.

Case study: Serena (Susanne Bier, 2014) If Shaun and Happy Valley demonstrate the artistic and commercial potential for Studiocanal when it comes to middlebrow production, a film like Serena vividly demonstrates its pitfalls. The project was announced in early 2012 and from the beginning the film was trumpeted in the trade press as combining the talents of its stars with those of its director, Oscar-winning Dane Susanne Bier to create a work of “auteur mainstream” cinema (Hopewell 2012a). The film featured all the hallmarks of a Studiocanal middlebrow work. It boasted two mainstream stars in Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Cooper was very well established by this point following his breakthrough performance in The Hangover (Todd Phillips, 2009) and Lawrence was in the ascent having had her breakthrough bravura performance in Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010). The pair had just finished shooting Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012), for which Lawrence would eventually win an Oscar, and she was on the verge of shooting the first film in the Hunger Games saga, a franchise that would make her an international superstar (Figure 12). Besides these stars, the film boasted a trio of accomplished character actors in supporting roles: Rhys Ifans, Toby Jones, and David Dencik. The novel by Ron

Figure 12 Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence are both box office draws and quality performers in Serena.

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Rash that served as source material was critically acclaimed and featured complex characters and an atmospheric period setting. Bier seemed to be a logical choice for directing this dark melodrama, having made several harrowing melodramas in her native Denmark, including the Oscar-winning In a Better World (2010). Among other things, her direction made interesting use of place and space, featuring the visual beauty of the Smoky Mountains (even if most of the film was shot in the Czech Republic), while conveying with some realism the gritty, or perhaps more appropriately, muddy realities of life in growing cities in 1920s America. The production budget spoke to the film’s middlebrow ambitions, with a reported final cost of between $25 and $30 million (Olivier Courson quoted in Hopewell 2012a). Despite all these quality elements being in place, the film was shelved for two years after completing its initial shoot, underwent several edits and occasioned a very public, embarrassing, and ultimately fruitless search for a mainstream distribution partner in the United States before settling for Magnolia, which shared a parent company with co-production partner 2929 (Siegel 2014). When it was finally released by Studiocanal in late 2014, the film was the subject of poor reviews and little audience interest, accumulating under $2 million in the company’s distribution territories. Magnolia was very much a default choice after unsuccessful attempts to shop the film to bigger companies and was not at all equipped to handle a film with large-scale commercial ambitions as the company typically only handles small-budget arthouse titles. The company gave Serena a simultaneous release in a limited number of theaters and on VOD and this narrow release combined with bad word-of-mouth resulted in the film only grossing about $180,000 in that market. Globally, the film made about $5 million at the box office and this poor performance combined with the negative reception make it one of Studiocanal’s most all-around disappointing films from this period. It is impossible to blame any single element of the film’s artistic or commercial qualities for its overall shortcomings. Instead we can look to the combination of those elements and observe that the attempts to make this film into a middlebrow work can encompass much of what went wrong for Serena. This includes the distribution strategy which included festival screenings in London and St.  Petersburg before the limited platform release that Studiocanal and Magnolia used. As commentators on film marketing have long pointed out, such a strategy hinges on good word-of-mouth to build audiences over time (for a general discussion of this strategy see Lukk 1997, 120–43). If a film has

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bad word-of-mouth, however, this strategy backfires as potential audiences hear that the film is not good and simply do not go and see it. In Serena’s case this is precisely what happened with the additional problem of having it be widely known that the film had been shelved for so long and unsuccessfully shopped around Hollywood to boot. The alternative more typically used when a film is likely to have bad reviews is to limit critical access to the film before its release, to promote the work heavily and release it simultaneously on as many screens as possible and to then sell as many tickets as possible before word gets out about the film’s supposed shortcomings. This strategy may have perhaps generated more returns for Serena but it would have been more costly and would therefore been more apt to incur greater losses for the companies if the film was still not successful. Moreover, this would have been an odd strategy to use with a prestigious period piece as “saturation releases” are more typically used with broad genre films such as horror films, comedies, or superhero films. This brings us back to textual dimensions of the film which clearly aspired to the category of quality period drama. This sort of genre is in theory a very viable middlebrow proposition, but it does entail certain expectations, particularly with casting like that of Serena with two young and beautiful stars. A recurring complaint in reviews of the film, for example, is that none of the characters were likeable (e.g., Bradshaw 2014; Keller 2014; Errigo 2014). Jennifer Lawrence is often described as “America’s sweetheart” but here she is amoral to begin with (convincing her husband at one point to murder his business partner) and after losing her own child spends the last third of the movie literally trying to arrange the violent murder of a baby (her husband’s illegitimate son), a character arc that was always unlikely to warm audiences’ hearts. Bradley Cooper’s George is duplicitous and coldblooded throughout but then is softened (somewhat abruptly in dramatic terms) by his love for his son, leaving the audience unsure of how to feel about his character. This would not be a problem, per se, for the reception of an arthouse film, where audiences are more accustomed to complex and unlikeable characters, but for these stars and the middlebrow costume drama generally, it clearly was. Even if the film had wanted to address the arthouse market more directly, there would likely have been some controversy over the ways in which the characters were softened from their counterparts in the novel, which among other things opens with the couple violently disemboweling the father of the woman that George has impregnated. One could go on and on with the elements of the film that rob it of its genre pleasures (e.g., the narrative ellipsis that wholly elides the

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George’s courtship of Serena, removing romance as a pleasure of the film) and its artistic integrity (e.g., what one critic called the “melodramatic absurdity” of its ending, featuring George getting killed by a panther and Serena self-immolating [Bradshaw 2014]), but suffice it to say that Bier’s own confession that the film suffered from a clear sense of what kind of film its backers wanted it to be is borne out by these textual problems (Keslassy 2016). This is not to say that there are no redeeming features in the film—Lawrence’s performance, for example, is one of the best of her already storied career and this was acknowledged by many reviewers (e.g., Bradshaw 2014; Errigo 2014)—but the rush toward the middlebrow ultimately overshadowed these.

7

Studiocanal and Popular Genre Cinema and Television

Middlebrow cinema may have been an important part of Studiocanal’s output during the last decade, but it has been popular genre films and series that have been the more numerous in terms of overall output and more lucrative in terms of the revenue they have generated for the company. This can be seen from a breakdown of the company’s biggest global box office successes during this period up to the end of 2017 (see Table 5). All of the top seven films released by the company have come from this side of the studio’s output, with only Shaun the Sheep Movie coming from the middlebrow releases. Going a bit deeper would add another middlebrow title to the top ten (Tinker at $82 million globally), but the list would be rounded out by Sammy’s Adventures ($85 million [Mitchell 2011a]) and The Last Exorcism ($70 million). Considering the looming sequels to Paddington and planned Liam Neeson action films to be released in 2018 (The Commuter and Hard Powder), it is likely that all of the company’s top ten films globally will be popular genre works by the end of 2018. In terms of television, the success of any given series is harder to measure beyond ratings and international sales, so it is not possible to give a corresponding measurement of the magnitude of success for Studiocanal’s popular genre television. That said, we can see by sheer quantity that such production is growing in its importance to the company. Leaving aside 2013, in which the company produced only one series—albeit, a very significant one in the form of Crossing Lines—there existed between 2013 and 2016 a balance within the company’s between the middlebrow productions, which constituted the majority of the output, and those of the popular genre tradition. With the addition of Urban Myths and especially Bambú Producciones to the Studiocanal fold in 2016, the balance swung toward genre television with Bambú alone producing over one hundred hours of content in 2017, nearly all of which falls into the category of

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Table 5 Global popularity of Studiocanal releases, 2006 onwards

Year of Release The Tourist (2010) Paddington (2014) Robocop (2014) Non-Stop (2014) Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016) Unknown (2011) Shaun the Sheep Movie* (2015)

Global Box Office Total (in million $) 280 267 242 236 211 130 106

Box Office in SC Territories (in million $) 28 119 24 45 24 26 47

*, Middlebrow film.

popular melodrama, led by its 72 hour telenovela En tierras salvajes (Televisa). With such a central position in the story of Studiocanal up to now and its likely increasing prominence in years to come, it is important to understand both the bigger strategies apparent in Studiocanal’s popular genre output during this period as well as the individual works that make up that output. This chapter will seek to accomplish these two goals while also differentiating these works from their middlebrow counterparts.

Sources: Remakes and popular literature Before getting into the genres and tendencies that characterize this segment of Studiocanal’s output, we should begin with some discussion of the nuances between the sources of the company’s popular works. At first glance there may seem to be strategic uniformity when it comes to the company’s creative practices in that, as was argued previously in Chapter 5, the company has manifested a preference for utilizing adaptation, remakes, franchise-building, and star-driven material no matter what kind of film or series they are making and marketing. This is true, but there are some significant differences between the ways in which these methods are practiced when it comes to the two modes of production, I argue, make up the Studiocanal corpus and these come down to the character of the underlying source material and the ways in which that material is utilized in the promotion of the completed works. Such can be seen with the two case study films that structure this section of the book. Like Tinker Tailor, Unknown was based on a novel: Hors de moi/Out of my Head by Didier Van Cauwelaert, who in the English-speaking world is an

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obscure figure at best. Only two of his many books have been translated and for these reasons perhaps the film’s marketing campaign made very little mention of the book whatsoever. Within the French-speaking world he is known as a popular fiction writer with a long career spanning over thirty years, and who has had several books reach best-seller status. He is not thought of as writing great literature, but instead someone who writes escapist fiction. Maybe one day he will be rediscovered as a writer of depth and substance, like John Le Carré or Patricia Highsmith who were initially lumped together with pulp fiction writers of their day only to be discovered over time to be more interesting. Such has not happened thus far with Van Cauwelaert and this is echoed by the ways in which the filmmakers used his text, adapting it liberally and not making much discursive use of the source novel or novelist to promote the film. Meanwhile, Tinker stuck close to the plot of its source novel and its reception very much involved Le Carré as well as the earlier television drama adaptation. To return to the kind of literature utilized in the case of Unknown, similarly relatively anonymous source material was used in the cases of The Gunman (see case study below), to cite just one example. This relatively anonymous source material is a hallmark of a number of the remakes Studiocanal has made in this vein, including The Tourist—based on the French film Anthony Zimmer (Jerôme Salle, 2005), a film so obscure outside of France that some have suggested that it was actively be kept out of circulation so as to not undermine the remake (e.g., Campbell 2010)—and And Soon the Darkness, the source material for which (a 1970 film of the same name, directed by Robert Fuest) remains largely unknown outside of the UK. There are numerous instances on Studiocanal’s development slate of such obscure films, being selected for remaking in English. A short list of these would include Hard Powder, based on a Norwegian film (In Order of Disappearance) that was seen by under 300,000 people in cinemas in 2014; Retribution, a prospective remake of a Spanish thriller (El desconocido [Dani de la Torre, 2015]) that is being developed as another Liam Neeson action vehicle; yet another project is based on Le Prix du danger (Yves Boisset, 1983), an unheralded French science fiction film (Newman 2015). Conveniently, such adaptations/remakes allow for some of the positive aspects from a production point of view in terms of an advanced state of development to start from (with the original acting as something of a creative template), while avoiding some of the challenges that are faced when it comes to marketing the films, namely unfavorable comparisons to source materials.

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Another, very divergent strategic usage of adaptation of various kinds is to use the popularity of the source material and to attract that material’s preconstituted audience. This often means drawing on the popular esteem for the specific author and/or work in question, but sometimes it also just means attracting audiences to something that is just plain popular. The marketing of Before I Go to Sleep (Rowan Joffé, 2014), for example, makes little mention of its source novel, even if the book was a best seller and has been translated into many different languages. Instead all the promotional materials—including posters, DVD covers, and trailers—make mention of the fact that the film is based on a best-selling novel. Such materials never use the author’s name or even the title of the book. Adaptation in this discursive formation exists only to assert pure popularity. In a similar gesture, book sales figures also feature prominently in the marketing of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society as Studiocanal never fails to mention in publicity documents that the book sold 7.5 million copies worldwide (e.g., Studiocanal 2017, 4). As part of this overarching strategy, Studiocanal has during this period joined its American studio counterparts in their collective quest to seize control of the hottest novels and novelists in a bid to convert their popularity into hit films and series. On the TV side, as discussed previously, Tandem’s relationship with best-selling author Ken Follett has historically been crucial to the company as Pillars of the Earth was based on one of his best sellers, as was the series’ sequel World without End (2012), and to a lesser extent the documentary series the company made with the author, Journey into the Dark Ages (2013). Tandem is currently working on yet another Follett adaptation in the form of the planned miniseries Code to Zero. Nicola Shindler at Red Productions, meanwhile, has built a strong working relationship with Harlan Coben, one of the world’s most popular novelists. This began with the production of The Five and its follow-up series Safe, both of which were based on new stories created by the author. In the wake of the successful launch of The Five, Coben and Shindler set up Final Twist, a production company that will be exclusively working on television adaptations of Coben’s novels. Coben is still free to make other series and films, but this company nonetheless gives Studiocanal access to some of the most popular works of fiction in the contemporary world. In terms of its film production activity, Studiocanal has likewise been seeking to acquire the rights to works of popular fiction, including Tom Wood’s bestselling Victor the Assassin series as well as two works from British romance

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novelist Jojo Moyes: the short story “Paris for One” and the novel The Last Letter from your Lover (Hopewell and Keslassy 2017). Moyes’s work in particular has been in demand from the Hollywood studios, with Me Before You (Thea Sharrock) proving a box office hit in 2016, grossing over $200 million for Warner Bros. The strategic drive toward acquiring famous literary properties in this period can be best seen in Studiocanal’s recent acquisition of all of the intellectual property rights, including publishing rights, to Paddington as the company hopes to monopolize this popular character across all media. This was a bold statement of intent by Studiocanal, paying a sum reported to be in the millions of pounds for the rights (Kanter 2016). At the time of this writing, Studiocanal was in the midst of releasing Paddington 2, which cost more than the original (Gant 2017). This outlay comes in addition to whatever costs are involved in developing Paddington 3, which the company has said is already in progress. Such aggressive franchise-building and cross-platform adaptation are hallmarks of the vertically and horizontally integrated majors and depending on how the commercial rollout of Paddington 2 proceeds, this could mean the consolidation of Studiocanal’s studio ambitions or perhaps their spectacular collapse. Either way, this approach to development and production is taken from the studio model, signaling a clear ambition from Studiocanal. Besides the approach to remaking describe above in which the source films are more obscure, the company has also used more famous films and television series for its source material for both middlebrow and popular genre works. Typically this has meant using arthouse titles or at least critically respected works for middlebrow remakes (e.g., A Bigger Splash which was based on La Piscine; Tinker with its celebrated television drama predecessor, etc.), whereas popular genre remake projects have been based on similarly popular genreoriented films (e.g., Cliffhanger). Occasionally though, the company has tried to make popular genre films out of respected classic films, incurring the wrath of fans of the original films. This can be seen in an early example of remaking in this period: Brighton Rock. Reflecting on the film’s poor critical and commercial reception, Courson highlighted the dangers in this approach to remakes by telling a trade reporter that the fame of the film backfired on Studiocanal, setting it up to fail with audiences by failing to live up to the original, with fans considering it to be “sacrilege” (quoted in Mitchell 2011b). Despite his mea culpa in 2011, Studiocanal has since developed remakes based on critically respected works like Quatermass and Don’t Look Now. In the case of Don’t Look Now, Donald

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Sutherland, star of the original, was particularly vehement in his denunciation of the project saying that the filmmakers (producers Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman) “should be ashamed of themselves” for “trying to profit off the back of [writer-director] Nicholas Roeg” (quoted in Child 2015). The tensions here between source material and mode of cinema here are interesting, with a larger cultural animosity apparent based in part on the ways in which a high cultural object is supposedly being turned into a lower one in the genre mode. But at least some of this animosity is also directed at the very idea of remaking films that are themselves famous and popular, regardless of whether they were arthouse or popular genre works. Robocop was poorly received in part for these reasons, and there remains a strong current of skepticism among fans of the original Escape from New York over how the remake (which is still in progress at the time of writing) will turn out. In instances such as these, we can see the dangers of conspicuous remaking, which are very akin to those of using famous literature with a big following. Yet the need for works with in-built audiences continues to drive such production practices at major studios, American or otherwise. Sequels, reboots/remakes, and adaptations are familiar variations on the production and marketing formula popularly and academically known as “high concept” film and television production. This approach, which was most influentially explored in Film Studies by Justin Wyatt (1994), places emphasis on simple, often one sentence-long summaries that can encapsulate the creative essence and marketability of a film, or in many cases television series. A typical high concept will concisely enumerate the familiar elements of a project (hinting often at the preexisting audiences that the film will hope to attract) along with the planned variations on those formulas. While high concept is presented by Wyatt and others as a Hollywood practice, Studiocanal’s popular genre output is replete with this approach to marketing and production and not just in the examples cited here or the many sequels and remakes produced or developed by the company and its affiliates. A clear instance of this can be seen in the way that The Gunman, for instance, which shared a genre, director, and casting strategy with Taken, was marketed as essentially a new version of that film but with a different star in Sean Penn (see case study below), as have the company’s films with Liam Neeson in various ways used Taken as a marketing touchstone. In cases without clear precedents, titles are often used to clearly indicate a narrative premise (e.g., The Last Exorcism or The Son of Bigfoot). Arguably the biggest practitioners of high concept in the Studiocanal fold can be seen in the Spanish television producers Bambú Producciones. This company

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regularly presents its forthcoming series in the Spanish media as variations on well-known global series. So it is that El Caso Asunta (Antena 3, 2017) was presented as a Spanish version of the Netflix true crime docuseries Making a Murderer (2015–) (Moreno 2016b). Likewise, the company’s forthcoming drama Fariña was spoken of in the Spanish trade press as the country’s answer to Narcos (Netflix, 2015–), in that both dealt with drug smuggling in the 1990s (Antena 3 2016). To promote this particular series on social media, Bambú urged fans to tweet about the show under the hashtag “#NuestroNarcos” which translates to “our [i.e. Spain’s] Narcos.” Besides these external marketing strategies, high concept is actually part of the company’s development approach, shaping the way series are conceived and how the narratives are structured, particularly in pilot episodes so that the audience is always made aware of the show’s premise, according to development executive Gema Neira (2017). With such an all-encompassing usage of high concept, Bambú is perhaps the most extreme example of the practice among the Studiocanal producers, but they are far from being the only ones. Tandem has done similar things with Crossing Lines, which was presented as a European version of the American series Criminal Minds (see case study below), just as its forthcoming series Take Two has been promoted as a revision of the formula seen in the series Castle (ABC, 2009–16), with the two series having been created and written by the same writers. The Picture Company likewise has seen its films and development projects labeled as “high concept” Studiocanal itself in promotional materials for films such as The Commuter (Studiocanal 2017, 5). Thus, one of the modes of creativity closely associated with Hollywood is also widely practiced within a European studio as well.

Favored genres I: The action film Creative and commercial practices that entail repetition of and variation on formulas naturally bring us to the deployment of genre, which is, as discussed already, pervasive at Studiocanal. The next four sections of the chapter will explore some of the company’s favored genres when it comes to its popularly oriented production and will do so by discussing not only the genres that are favored but also the producer relationships that often underpin the company’s genre output. To begin this discussion, we can return to Chapter 4’s argument that Unknown was a formative example of Studiocanal’s genre production

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during this period. In order to flesh this out somewhat, we can consider some of the industrial dimensions of the film. To begin with, the film was further fruit of the company’s by now long-running collaboration with producer Joel Silver. As discussed previously, by the late 2000s Silver, once the king of Hollywood blockbuster production in the 1980s and 1990s, was finding it increasingly difficult to find financing from the Hollywood studios as producer deals in general were being culled and besides Silver in particular was widely known for his extravagant spending. For these reasons, Studiocanal became an investor in his Dark Castle genre pictures on a relatively limited basis in exchange for French distribution rights. These were mainly thriller and horror films, the most internationally successful of which was Orphan. Unknown would represent an escalation of this relationship in that from now on Studiocanal would fully finance the films they produced with Silver and his companies in exchange for distribution rights for Studiocanal territories and sales rights for the rest of the world. In creative terms, Unknown would also initiate interrelated generic practices and production collaborations that have become crucial to the company’s fortunes during this period, particularly as they pertain to its work in popular genres. The success of Unknown helped to cement the company’s strategic dedication to the action genre, a genre in which it had experienced some success in the 1990s and which, in its tier 2 budget iteration at least, was undergoing a commercial renaissance in the 2010s in large part due to the unexpected success of Taken. Studiocanal would go on to make The Dinosaur Project in 2012, which did not perform all that well but still which attempted to utilize special-effects driven spectacle in the service of a thriller plot. The company really began its push into action, however in 2014 with Non-Stop, very much a follow-up to Unknown, reuniting the studio with the production team, star, and director of the 2011 film. That year, the company also released Robocop across its distribution network. Since then the company has sought to release approximately one stardriven action film per year, including the Sean Penn star vehicle The Gunman in 2015, Bastille Day/The Take in 2016 starring Idris Elba, and The Commuter, another Liam Neeson vehicle which had been slated to be released in late 2017 before being pushed back to January 2018. Additionally, an important part of the company’s television output has been the series Crossing Lines which was equal parts police procedural and action series, with chases and shootouts occupying as much screen time as investigations (see case study below). Looking forward, the company has indicated that action will continue to be a central fixture on

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its slate, with Hard Powder (again starring Neeson) in postproduction for a likely 2018 release. These titles are complimented by at least fifteen projects that the company has in various stages of development whose plot and/or creative elements seem to align them with the action genre. Besides his work on Unknown and Non-Stop Silver and/or his company was also behind The Gunman (Silver himself took his name off of the latter film for reasons discussed in the case study below). Even before The Gunman was released, Studiocanal announced its investment in the company started by Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman, who worked at Silver Pictures and were producers on all three Studiocanal/Silver productions. Since this point, Rona and Heineman’s company, The Picture Company, has been central to Studiocanal’s genre filmmaking plans, having developed at least ten projects. All of these development projects are in the action/thriller or horror genres. Another key creative member of the team behind Unknown that has come to figure largely in the Studiocanal story has been the film’s Spanish director Jaume Collett-Serra. Collet-Serra got his start as a director in Hollywood with Joel Silver on horror films such as The House of Wax (2005) and Orphan before making Unknown. Collet-Serra’s reputation as commercially reliable director of action and horror films has grown steadily during this time, with hits such as NonStop and The Shallows (2016) putting him in high demand. During this time he has made two further action films with Studiocanal as a director (Non-Stop and The Commuter) after Studiocanal helped him to set up his production company Ombra Films in 2011. Ombra has also been involved in the development of two action films for Studiocanal (Retribution and Drug Wars), both of which are collaborations with The Picture Company and Ombra received a producing credit on The Commuter as well.

Favored genres II: The horror film If Unknown then gave Studiocanal an artistic template to work with, it also provided them with many of the artists they would need to mass produce action films as well as in another popular idiom that has been significant to their output: the horror film. As can be seen in the cases of at least the filmmakers discussed thus far in this chapter, there is some overlap in production expertise when it comes to horror and the action film, with The Picture Company, for instance, developing horror

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projects such as Don’t Look Now and Collet-Serra’s company Ombra producing Anna in 2013 for Studiocanal. There is also similar overlap between action and horror in the case of Studiocanal’s production partner Eric Newman, with whom the company worked during his days at Strike Entertainment on the Universal lot where, among other projects, he produced Robocop with Studiocanal’s involvement. Newman gave the company one of its first bona fide commercial hits when he came to them to seek financing for his low-budget horror film The Last Exorcism. The film went on to gross over $70 million, likely representing a substantial profit for Studiocanal which financed the film for a reported budget of about $2 million (Hopewell 2011). This success led to a 2013 sequel, which performed less well than its predecessor but still grossed over $25 million globally on a reported budget of $4 million (The Last Exorcism 2 2013). As has often been the case in recent years—think for instance of The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) or Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007)—Strike and Studiocanal were thus able to generate a high rate of return from a microbudget horror film and Studiocanal has since tried, with significantly less success, to imitate this formula. To this end the company released And Soon the Darkness in 2011 hoping to capitalize on the success of other “torture porn” horror films such as Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005). The company released The Awakening (Nick Murphy, 2011) the same year, a more gothic, costumed take on the genre, and in 2013 released the aforementioned Anna, a supernatural chamber piece set in the near future. None of these films achieved any great financial success and, like the vast majority of horror films, all were failures with critics. The 2016 television series Crazyhead, about a pair of twentysomething demon hunters, fared better with critics but was canceled after a single season by commissioners E4 and Netflix. Despite this poor track record in the genre, Studiocanal has persisted in developing more horror projects including the aforementioned remake of Don’t Look Now and a number of projects set up with Newman’s Grand Electric production company, including potential remakes of the 1962 British film Burn, Witch, Burn (Sidney Hayers) and the 1983 film Le Prix du danger, along with an adaptation of the novel Life and Death in Eden, which is set among the surviving crew members of the HMS Bounty on Pitcairn Island as they kill each other off while trapped on the island (Newman 2015). Red is likewise developing a remake of Quatermass, meaning that Studiocanal is not done with the horror genre yet.

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Favored genres III: Romantic comedies and melodrama At the other end of the taste spectrum and targeting completely different audiences than action and horror films are Studiocanal’s romantic comedies and melodramas. The romantic comedy in particular has been important historically to the company, as seen in Chapter 3’s discussion of the company’s investment in transatlantic romcoms made by Working Title in the late 1990s and 2000s. Working Title continued to work in this genre—arguably the only genre in which they regularly make films that are outside of middlebrow textual practices—for Studiocanal during the contemporary period with I Give It a Year and Bridget Jones’s Baby. Studiocanal also partnered with British producers Big Talk to make two other romcoms featuring British and American characters/ stars: Cuban Fury and Man Up (Ben Palmer, 2015). Aside from Bridget Jones’s Baby, which was the third installment of a very popular franchise launched in the early 2000s, Studiocanal’s romcoms have not been all that successful. In fact, Cuban Fury and Man Up were abject failures commercially with global grosses of $5.7 million and $2.4 million respectively. Only I Give It a Year could be called even a moderate success, having fared better than its counterparts with over $29 million globally and $17 million in Studiocanal’s territories. Looking forward, despite some of the difficulties experienced with its recent romcoms, Studiocanal seems to be pressing ahead with the genre, though not to the extent seen with action films or family fare. The company released Madame in late 2017 which involves a comedic case of mistaken identity that leads to a cross-class romance between housemaid Maria (Rossy de Palma) and British aristocrat David (Michael Smiley). While the film is still rolling out internationally at the time of writing, it so far has received a tepid critical reception and very little commercial response in any of the markets in which it has been released. Another work in development is Dan Mazer’s fictionalized remake of the documentary Three Miles North of Molkom (Robert Cannan and Corinna McFarlane, 2008), a documentary which featured a fish-out-of-water story involving an Australian rugby player ending up at a New Age retreat in northern Sweden, only to unexpectedly fall in love while there. A fourth Bridget Jones film is also said to be in the works (Denham 2016), but no confirmation has been made by any of the parties involved as to whether this is indeed being developed. Studiocanal’s efforts to produce and distribute romcoms coincides with greater production of female-centered melodramas by the company in recent

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years. These include The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society which is at the time of this writing is beginning its global rollout and which features a period romance set against the backdrop of the aftermath of Second World War. A similar interest in period melodrama can be seen in The Cable Girls the series created by Bambú Producciones for Netflix in 2017. This series features four central characters and their four separate but interrelated storylines which all revolve around love and female social roles in 1920s Spain. Such a plot and themes are in keeping with Bambú’s core concerns and track record as one of Spain’s most popular producers of period melodrama (Cascajosa 2015, 233). Indeed the company’s biggest hit to date Velvet—with its multi-plot narration, period setting, and thematic emphasis on romantic love—can be seen as a template (or, more appropriately, a high concept) for The Cable Girls and indeed much of Bambú’s production slate for 2017, which includes two further period melodramas: Love in a Time of War, a wartime saga of four nurses in North Africa in the 1940s, and Velvet Colección (Movistar+, 2017–), a spinoff of Velvet in which the action moves from Madrid to Barcelona in the 1960s. Even when not directly utilizing the Velvet formula, Bambú has tended to work in this genre and to address its works to a female audience. This emphasis combined with Bambú’s prolific output, likely means that Studiocanal will see its overall slate feature this genre more and more. The aforementioned development deal that Studiocanal recently signed with romance novelist Jojo Moyes for two feature projects also point in this direction.

Favored genres IV: Family fare It should be abundantly clear by this point that Paddington is the single most important film produced by Studiocanal during this period. As was detailed in Chapter 4, the company had its biggest commercial success within its territories with a work of family entertainment and this was part of a larger, long-standing strategy at the company to target this particular genre, despite it being a genre that is notoriously competitive given Hollywood’s domination of this segment of the market. The reasons for Hollywood’s especial domination of this particular segment are numerous, but the most important factors include the majors’ ability to control the most famous characters of children’s literature (e.g., Winnie the Pooh) and to use its financial muscle to utilize the latest technology in terms of computer graphics imagery (e.g., Pixar or DreamWorks Animation) and to

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hire the most famous vocal and other kinds of talents. In the case of Paddington at least, Studiocanal is attempting to utilize precisely these strategies to create a franchise in the Hollywood mold. But even before the company set out to make Paddington, it had been trying to get a foothold in this market. The importance of family films at the international level can be seen in the first production acquisition made under Courson, that being the purchase of Belgian animation outfit nWave in 2010. This acquisition came on the back of Studiocanal’s distribution of nWave’s 2010 breakthrough hit Sammy’s Adventures in all of its territories at the time. Since this time, nWave has been a consistent producer, making five animated features and one live-action nature documentary shot in 3D (African Safari [Ben Stassen, 2013], along with a television series based on the Sammy’s Adventures films. The company’s work has had moderate box office grosses—its biggest hit to date since the Studiocanal deal has Robinson Crusoe/The Wild Life with approximately $40 million globally—and has worked with budgets consistently in the €15–25 million range. This relationship has recently come to an end, making their 2017 release Son of Bigfoot the last the two companies will collaborate on. Besides the relationship with nWave, and at the other end of the artistic spectrum from that company’s output, the most important ongoing production relationship in animation for Studiocanal is Aardman Animations. But given Aardman’s particular working methods, representational tendencies, and audience address, it is more appropriate to consider them in relation to Studiocanal’s middlebrow output, as seen in the previous chapter. That said, it is significant for understanding the scope of Studiocanal’s efforts in the family market to know that they have made one feature already with Aardman while also having two others at various stages of production at the time of this writing. In terms of live-action family fare, Studiocanal has had one major success besides Paddington during this period. This was the (somewhat unexpectedly) internationally popular German-language readaptation of Heidi which proved not only a hit in Germany and other alpine nations, but also in France and elsewhere in Europe, generating 3.3 million admissions across the continent in total. Studiocanal’s live-action family films are so far a small portion of their overall output, but development plans seem to indicate this could potentially change. Not only are there at least two more Paddington sequels in the works, but the company is also developing a readaptation of The Secret Garden with Heyday Films, the company behind Paddington (Jaafar 2016d) as well as an adaptation of the children’s book The Magic Faraway Tree (Clarke 2017b). Additionally,

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the company is developing a potential live-action franchise of holiday films in the form of Matthew Haig’s trilogy of novels about the origins of Santa Claus (Wiseman 2016), and a television project based on the young adult fiction title Noah Can’t Even (Wood 2017). Such a body of production activity in live-action and animated content make it clear that the family genre is among the highest of priorities for Studiocanal going forward, once again speaking to their ambitions as they wade into perhaps the most competitive segment of the global film and television market, one long dominated by the majors.

Between the exotic and the anonymous: Spatial representation in Studiocanal’s genre works Whatever specific genre is being deployed, we find in Studiocanal’s popular genre output a consistent set of representational tendencies that speak to the influence that the rise of Studiocanal as a global studio is having on Europe’s image in the eyes of the world. These take two distinct forms that need to be explored here, one of which closely follows the pattern seen in the case of Unknown. We can recall that this film depicted Europe through the usage of a famous capital city and that moreover this capital city was largely imagined in terms of familiar, even clichéd touristic locations. This tendency is echoed in many of Studiocanal’s popular genre works, as can be seen in the many films and series that pass through or are set in central London. Works such as Paddington, Bastille, I Give It a Year, and many others make use of what Charlotte Brunsdon has dubbed “Landmark London” (2007, 21–56), and as such visually run through a litany of familiar sites, including Big Ben, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Tower Bridge, the London Eye, famous rail stations, and tube stops such as Paddington Station or King’s Cross, and other clichéd parts of the city. Indeed, it is a testament to the uniformity across Studiocanal’s London-set films that one can find an overhead shot of Tower Bridge being used to introduce the city in two films as disparate in generic terms as Paddington and The Gunman. Across the broader Studiocanal corpus, we find other European cities represented via similar metonymic strategies: Paris is reduced to the Eiffel Tower and other famous plazas (e.g., Bastille Day); Barcelona is represented in terms of the Sagrado Familia and Sagrat Cor churches (e.g., The Gunman); Madrid is seen in terms of the bright lights and iconic buildings of Gran Vía, the walkways of Parque del Buen Retiro, and other famous locales (e.g., The Cable Girls); and so on (Figure 13). Perhaps

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Figure 13 Lidia (Blanca Suárez) meets with corrupt policeman Inspector Beltrán (Carlos Kaniowsky) in Madrid’s famous Parque Retiro in The Cable Girls.

no work better demonstrates this tendency to picture Europe via a catalog of capitals and clichés than Crossing Lines as its premise involving a team of pan-European detectives—who themselves are cultural stereotypes—justifies the travel between capitals and other major cities, locations that are typically represented by establishing shots containing the touristic clichés of whatever given city the episode may be set (see case study below). When Studiocanal’s popular films do not happen to be set in capital cities or even in Europe necessarily, there is still a tendency toward clichéd or stereotypical development of space. Cases in point here would include two American-set films: The Factory and Hard Powder, but of which set themselves in stereotypically snowy parts of the country (Buffalo, New York and Aspen, Colorado) and depict them in precisely such terms. Another American-set example of this tendency would be Robocop, set as it is in a dystopic Detroit of the future that happens to coincide closely with stereotypical ideas about Detroit itself as an impoverished, decaying postindustrial city. Africa is consistently represented as dangerously underdeveloped (e.g., The Dinosaur Project, The Gunman) and South America is shown to be full of dangerous criminals intent of raping North American women (And Soon the Darkness). If one strand of Studiocanal’s popular genre productions gives us clichés and stereotypes when it comes to space and place (and sometimes characters), there is another that works in a nearly diametric manner. This strand seeks to wholly remove any substantial sense of place from the equation, opting instead

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to set the work either in interstitial spaces or overwhelmingly generic ones. Two otherwise very different films typify the interstitial approach: Non-Stop, which is set entirely aboard a transatlantic flight from New York to London and Robinson Crusoe which is set on a desert island in an otherwise unspecified part of the world. In both cases, the films use their settings to bring together diverse groups of characters (diverse in terms of race and nationality in the case of Non-Stop, in terms of species of talking animals in Robinson Crusoe) and to isolate them from any specific national and cultural context. This is then used to propel the action as the characters find themselves in unpleasant limbos of various sorts, but the cultural in-betweeness and placelessness is also significant for opening the film up to audiences from a wide range of cultural and geographic backgrounds because the film is set nowhere specifically. Demonstrating the company’s desire for these kinds of settings, we can see on Studiocanal’s development slate works set in interstitial places such as trains (The Commuter), army bases (Sana), and islands of different sorts (e.g., Category 5, set on a Caribbean island; Life and Death in Eden, set on an island in the South Pacific). A similar strategy involves setting films and series in generic suburban spaces, often in England or America. Such works often pointedly refuse to divulge any place names (e.g., Before I Go to Sleep, Anna, Prey [ITV, 2014–15], or Thunder and the House of Magic) though the countries and sometimes regions within the countries (e.g., The Last Exorcism with its American South setting; The Driver [BBC One, 2014] with its setting in the north of England; Before I Go to Sleep in the London suburbs; and Crazyhead somewhere in the south of England) in which they are set are clear via accents. Another variation is to use fictional towns and settings. This tendency is seen most vividly, and most unexpectedly, in the case of three series from Red Production, the company heretofore famed (and discussed in the previous chapter) for its very culturally specific television dramas set in the north of England. Safe (Netflix and C8, 2018), The Five (Sky, 2017), and Paranoid (ITV and Netflix, 2016) are set in fictional towns somewhere vaguely described as being somewhere in England, but the characters in both series speak with a range of regional accents that are impossible, in the final analysis, to link with the shows’ geographic setting. Such representational strategies would seem to be calculated with global audiences in mind, audiences that won’t recognize or care about such details. Paranoid nicely encapsulates the range of clichéd and generic representational strategies of Studiocanal’s popular genre production, having at its heart two

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storylines, one set in the fictional English town of Woodmere while the other is set in Dusseldorf, Germany, making it one of the many cross-border crime narratives to be found in Studiocanal’s oeuvre. Throughout the series, the British town is represented visually in terms of generic shots of town squares, rural landscapes, and anonymous motorways whereas Dusseldorf is represented in terms of touristic locales such as the Rhine Tower, which is first seen as the British detective Bobby (Robert Glenister) arrives into the city from the airport, introducing the city in much the same way London or Berlin were introduced in Studiocanal films. Paranoid is thus set between the anonymous and exotic parts of Europe, as are many of Studiocanal’s popular genre works.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to give an overview of the strategic usage of popular genre production by Studiocanal during this period, focusing the differences between this mode and the middlebrow works discussed in the previous chapters and on some of the key genres utilized and producers involved in this part of the Studiocanal oeuvre. As is the case at all the Hollywood studios, and indeed has been the case also at many of the present and historical “minimajors” such as Lionsgate (Perren 2013), Miramax (Perren 2012, 113–43), and others, popular genre products are the lifeblood of Studiocanal. It is thus where most of the company’s production resources are allocated and such works end up being the ones that draw the most audiences and therefore have the biggest impact on popular attitudes about such ideas as European identity. I have thus hoped to illuminate the ways in which the company approaches making films and series in this vein while providing at least a cursory overview of some of the representational tendencies of these works. In all these facets, the films and series in this tradition differ sometimes subtly, sometimes not, from their middlebrow counterparts. To understand the totality of Studiocanal’s impacts on global screen culture, we must however account for both strands of their output during the first decade of their operation as an integrated studio. Having now provided just this, we can now return to the bigger picture of European and global film and television history. It is to such an examination of Studiocanal’s place in that history that we will turn in the book’s conclusion.

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Case study: The Tourist (Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck, 2010) Made very early in this period, The Tourist remains the most popular film made by Studiocanal on the basis of global box office up to the end of 2017. The film earned $278 million internationally, including $28 million in Studiocanal’s three territories. For this reason alone it would merit some in-depth discussion in this chapter, but there is more to The Tourist to interest scholars of Studiocanal than simply its popularity. In many ways, the film is an amalgamation of a number of Studiocanal’s signature industrial and artistic strategies, many of which continue strategies apparent in previous epochs at the company while presaging those to be employed later in the period. As such, the film presents us with a unique opportunity to observe Studiocanal’s transition from a local French and library-driven company dabbling in international production to a distribution-driven global studio. Among other things, The Tourist is a prime example of the company’s leveraging of its library of French films to wade into international production, just as it had done a year earlier with Chloe. The company produced and released Anthony Zimmer in 2005 through its then subsidiary Mars Films to moderate success, having drawn over 800,000 admissions in France (a million admissions is considered the benchmark for a local film to achieve “hit” status). Spyglass Entertainment, with whom Studiocanal was working at the time as an equity investor on the production company’s Leap Year (Anand Tucker, 2010), approached the producers of the French film with an offer to remake it. They reportedly submitted this proposal via star Catherine Zeta-Jones who was initially attached to play the female lead in the film. Once the offer was accepted in 2006, the project went through the proverbial “development hell” (Benamon 2010), a period of limbo that saw Zeta-Jones replaced by Charlize Theron, who was then replaced by eventual star Angelina Jolie. The male lead was also recast several times with Tom Cruise at one point attached. The creative shuffles also involved at least two directors and a total of three screenwriters. Throughout this process, Studiocanal and Spyglass persisted until finding a financial co-production partner in British producer Graeme King, whose firm had an output agreement with Hollywood major Columbia Pictures. The de facto backing by a Hollywood major allowed the film to be made on a budget reported to be around $100 million, a figure far beyond anything attempted by Studiocanal on its own up to this point. The final deals had Studiocanal distributing the film in the UK, France, and Germany with Columbia/Sony Worldwide managing the rest of the world. Such

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an arrangement would prove to be an evolution from the limited distribution rights deals signed for Working Title and Dark Castle films in the 2000s and anticipated the more expansive deals that characterize the majority of films made during the period. It also signaled Studiocanal’s intention to act as a distribution partner rather than the equity partner it had been for most of its history up until 2008, a point made forcefully by Courson in a round of trade press interviews and public talks on the eve of the release of The Tourist: “We are not in the co-financing business. . . . We are not equity financiers. We are looking for distribution rights” (Goodridge 2010). The size of the film’s budget meant that financial partners were a necessity for Studiocanal and the film can thus be seen as one of a vein of (attempted) production on the company’s part that encompasses other big-budget remake projects with Hollywood partners, including Robocop (with Sony), the forthcoming Escape from New York (with Fox), and long-running development projects such as Cliffhanger. As a Hollywood coproduction, The Tourist was subject to many of the pressures associated with that particular form of cinema. This meant that the film’s fortunes as it navigated “development hell” often rested on the decisions of stars. Not only did Catherine Zeta-Jones act as the face of the effort to secure the remake rights for the film, but the film moved forward through redrafts as different stars became attached. It was ultimately Angelina Jolie who guided the choice of director, having reportedly (along with her then husband Brad Pitt) persuaded Donnersmark to rejoin the project after he originally left it and to do a final draft of the script (Benamon 2010). Her attachment and that of male star Johnny Depp are what finally sent the film into production and which ultimately guided the reception of the film. The script’s development process is also telling of the pressures associated with Hollywood’s desire for “four quadrant films,” that is, films that appeal to men and women of all ages.1 The initial draft of the film’s script was written by Julian Fellowes but it was felt by the producers to be lacking in action and suspense and too much oriented toward comedy and romance (Benamon 2010), leading to the hiring of script doctors. In its final form, the film tried to strike a balance between being a light comedy and an action-oriented thriller. Though it was produced with these Hollywood pressures, the film nonetheless bears some of the hallmarks of Studiocanal’s brand of filmmaking. The film’s romantic comedy storyline involving the courtship between Frank (Depp) and Elise (Jolie) strongly resembles those of Working Title’s famed transatlantic romcoms. In the couple itself we have an (apparent) American in Frank (though he is later revealed to be British financier Alex Pierse in disguise) and a Briton in

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Elise. Like Notting Hill, but with the nationalities reversed, we have a bumbling self-deprecating man chasing after an impossibly glamorous, exotic woman, eventually winning her over despite the differences separating them. Besides the romcom elements, the film also adheres to the Studiocanal preference for using European directors, including here another former winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, with Donnersmark having won the award in 2006 for The Lives of Others. As was the case with other projects in which Studiocanal adopted this approach such as Deadfall and Serena, the film was poorly received by critics, despite three nominations for Golden Globe awards, but also with the additional embarrassment of conjecture at the time that Jolie would not attend the Golden Globes ceremony in order to avoid drawing attention to the puzzling nomination of the film (Masters 2010). In what is the most telling similarity to the broader corpus of Studiocanal popular genre films, however, The Tourist features a very exotic usage of a European setting. In this case the film was set in Venice, a decision that contrasts with the scenic but not iconic Nice used in Anthony Zimmer. The Tourist does not miss a chance to showcase the exotic, tourist-friendly locales of Venice, including the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute which is featured in one of the first establishing shots we see in the film, the Hotel Danieli where the characters stay, other landmarks such as the San Giorgio Maggiore and the Basilica San Marco and the most clichéd of Venetian icons, the gondolas, and boats traversing the canals of the city. Even before the characters arrive in Venice, the action opens in the glamorous plazas of Paris and passes through the famous Gare du Lyon on the way to Venice itself. As mentioned, commercially the film was very successful in terms of overall gross, though the US box office total of $67 million was viewed as disappointing. But then the film became a prototypical inverted hit with international grosses tripling that of the American receipts. Studiocanal was thus well placed to profit from the film’s disproportionate success outside of the United States. Either way, Studiocanal’s strategy of coproducing big-budget remakes continues to this day and as such we should see The Tourist as one of the most pivotal early successes for the company during this period.

Case study: Crossing Lines (2013–15) Crossing Lines was the first returning series launched by Tandem Communications after its acquisition by Studiocanal (miniseries Labyrinth and Titanic:

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Blood and Steel, created before the acquisition, aired in 2012) and as such the series marked the beginning of the company’s larger strategic push into serial television drama. The show is remarkable for a number of interrelated reasons relating to industrial developments in European television, its usage of the procedural genre and its usage of space and place. For the internal workings of Studiocanal, the acquisition of Tandem meant in large part acquiring the company’s capacity for dealmaking. It had made its reputation up to this point by piecing together sources of financing to create often big-budget miniseries—Pillars of the Earth was reported to cost about £40 million to make (MacInnes 2010)—without the initial support of a US broadcast commissioner, though all the company’s shows were subsequently licensed to US networks. This is precisely the strategy that was used to create Crossing Lines as Tandem cobbled together commissions from France’s TF1, Germany’s Prosieben.Sat.1 and Sony’s AXN cable networks to get the series greenlit. Though this series did also have a US broadcast partner on board from very early (NBC), Tandem CEO Rola Bauer told the trade press that the financing package was not dependent on that contribution (quoted in Roxborough 2013). True to Bauer’s claims, the series did manage to survive after NBC canceled the show after the first season, going on to make two additional seasons with only its European commissioners along with sales to broadcasters around the world, including Netflix for the US market. Crossing Lines features a narrative premise and cast of characters that parallel its multinational financing. From a base in The Hague, a team of police officers from various European countries and the United States are brought together to work for the International Criminal Court to solve crimes in Europe that involve the crossing of national borders. To understand what made Crossing Lines so popular with broadcast partners around the globe, we should begin with an important industrial context, that being the rise of “quality” serial drama in the form of prestige series such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad. It is not the case that Crossing Lines aspired to be a series in this mold, in fact just the opposite: Crossing Lines was an attempt to meet a broader demand for formulaic episodic procedural crime fiction, the polar opposite of many of the key “quality” series of the day. This was a genre that has steadily fallen out of favor with US television—which has spent much of the 2010s chasing prestige series—but which was extremely popular in international markets. In such countries, broadcasters preferred to schedule narratively self-contained episodes in blocks with scant regard for order, knowing that audiences would

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not need to have seen other episodes in order to enjoy which ever was airing at any given time (Tartaglione 2015a). Traditionally, broadcast networks would simply acquire blocks of episodes of series such as CSI or Law and Order from US studios to meet this demand, but as US networks cut down on the number of shows they were making in this vein, opportunities arose for independents, including European companies who could also offer something closer to home to audiences on the continent. In targeting precisely this potentially lucrative niche, Crossing Lines was ahead of its time in some ways. Since Crossing Lines began airing in 2013, several procedurals aimed at international markets have been produced or been put into development. A consortium of broadcasters including Denmark’s DR, Sweden’s SVT, and Germany’s ZDF came together to commission The Team, which began airing in 2015. This series has a premise very similar to that of Crossing Lines as a team of three detectives from Denmark, Belgium, and Germany are brought together to solve border-crossing crimes. Another procedural in this vein was CBS’s spinoff of the very popular (domestically and internationally) franchise Criminal Minds, a series that was very much the high concept model for Crossing Lines, as we will see. This spinoff was entitled Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders, which involved a team of American FBI agents tasked with solving crimes involving American citizens in various countries. In addition to these, EOne’s most prolific production partner Mark Gordon, who also produces Criminal Minds and produced the spinoff before it was canceled in 2017, has been developing the American-set series Darkness Falls for German network ProSieben Sat.1 (Tartaglione 2015b). Finally, American major NBCUniversal has gone so far as to sign a co-production accord with TF1 in France and RTL in Germany expressly for the purpose of developing English-language procedurals that can air on the two networks as well as NBC in the United States (Tartaglione 2015a). The first project made under this accord (entitled Gone) was set to air late in 2017. Finally, Tandem themselves landed a commission from ABC, Vox/ RTL, and France Televisions to make the procedural Take Two, which will air in 2018. In trying to tap into this market in the early 2010s, Tandem approached American writer Edward Allen Bernero with the idea of a pan-European procedural. Bernero had been a showrunner and writer on a number of American procedurals such as Criminal Minds and Third Watch (NBC, 1999–2005) and had been for a time leading the effort to produce a spinoff of Criminal Minds set in Europe (Mipmarkets 2013). This idea would become the high concept

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nucleus of Crossing Lines, which borrowed much of its premise from Criminal Minds, in the process presenting the International Criminal Court (highly implausibly) as the equivalent of Europe’s FBI and the show’s central team as equivalent to Criminal Minds’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Just as they moved all over the United States to solve crimes (by airplane), the team in Crossing Lines moves all over Europe from episode to episode, though in a nod to European specificity, they do so by train. Other trappings of the procedural genre are all there: there is not one but several veteran detectives haunted by past cases and/ or personal tragedies; a byzantine bureaucracy that threatens to prevent the team from stopping criminals (particularly in seasons one and two in which the team needs to convince the ICC in every episode that the case meets the criteria for intervention); there are the customary rivalries and tensions between local police and the transnational team; office romances; cliffhanger episodes; and so on. Bauer and Bernero for their part spoke openly about how the show was closely modeled on American series (Mipmarkets 2013). Distinguishing the series from its normative American counterparts—that is, making up the other part of the high concept—was the show’s deployment of Europeanness, in other words its characters and its use of locations. In the case of Crossing Lines, the team is from across Europe and many of them, consistent with many of Studiocanal’s popular fictions, are stereotypes in one way or another of the nationalities. Sebastian Berger, for example, is the team’s computer expert (itself one of the archetypal stock characters of the procedural, therefore the equivalent of “techie” Penelope Garcia [Kirsten Vangsness] on Criminal Minds) and is also its only German character. This plays on the popular stereotype of Germans being tech-savvy, just as Tommy’s (Richard Flood) propensity for violence is closely related to stereotypes about the Irish and Irish Travelers in particular. Other stereotypical figures would include the beautiful Italian woman with links to the Mafia (Eva [Gabriella Pression]) and the many Eastern European villains, now familiar figures in crime fiction due in part to the success of Taken’s Albanian “baddies.” This approach to character is matched by the visual use of clichés to depict European spaces. In one of the opening shots of the pilot, a woman is chased through a park and murdered. To illustrate where exactly the action is taking place, the camera cranes upward to show us the Eiffel Tower on the skyline. As the show progresses and the team moves back and forth across the continent, the show’s editing falls into a pattern of using establishing shots of popular landmarks as shorthand for signaling wherever the team may be at any given

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moment: the London Eye for its eponymous home city; the alps for Austria; a windmill for Rotterdam, and so on. The show’s representational approach to Europeaness is thus familiar and shallow, rooted very much in the discourses that are found across the exotic branch of Studiocanal’s popular works. Through two seasons and despite cancellation by NBC, Crossing Lines developed something of a popular following in spite of poor critical reviews. Season three, however, saw major changes to the cast, including the departures of Louis (Marc Lavoigne), Carl Hickman (William Fichtner), Eva, and Tommy, changes which alienated many fans of the show, with the loss of American character Hickman in particular (ironically, given its supposed European orientation) hurting the show’s popularity.2 Compounding the problem was the abrupt manner in which these departures were handled within the narrative, with the departures of some characters happening offscreen (“they went home” says Arabella [Lara Rossi] tersely at the outset of season three), while other loose ends from the end of season two were just simply left unresolved in season three. Two major plotlines from season two just never got explained or resolved. One involved Eva, who was last seen in Spain and whom Dorn (Donald Sutherland) had seemed to have tracked down in the final moments of the season finale. In that scene he seems to find something in her hotel room, begins to weep, but we never see what he sees and the issue is never addressed in season three. The logical assumption is thus that Eva was killed, but we’re never told how or why exactly it took place. Another unresolved issue was Hickman’s growing (rightful) suspicion that Tommy’s brother was a bank robber that eluded the team in a previous episode. This was developed a great deal in the final episode and a conflict between the two characters was foreshadowed, but, of course, never came to pass as both actors left the show after the season ended. Such disruption to the narrative is perhaps related to the show’s change of showrunners between the two seasons (Bernero departed and Frank Spotnitz assumed the role), but whatever the cause, these changes alienated fans. Whatever the reasons, and despite the considerable financial creativity and dexterity shown by the producers over the life of the series, at the time of writing it seems that the show has come to an end. Tandem however continues to develop procedurals closely modeled on American precedents, including Sex, Lies and Handwriting which varies the model seen in series like Lie to Me (Fox, 2009–11) in which an expert in truthfulness catches criminals lying to police, by making the expert a specialist in handwriting analysis. Another series that has recently been commissioned is Take Two which is being written by the same team (Terri

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Edda Miller and Andrew Marlowe) behind the popular ABC procedural Castle and which features a similar premise to that series, one that pairs a private investigator with a washed up actress who once starred in a detective series to solve unusual crimes. (Castle’s plot involved the pairing of a NYPD detective with a crime novelist to solve unusual murders.) Tandem is also working on a series with Calli Khouri, the creator of the American series Nashville (ABC and CMT, 2012–), to make a musical series based in Miami (entitled Deep City), so even when they aren’t making procedurals, the high concept approach is still apparent in the company’s projects.

Case study: The Gunman (Pierre Morel, 2015) The Gunman was the third and final collaboration between producer Joel Silver and Studiocanal, following the successful releases of Unknown and Non-Stop. Like those films, The Gunman was set to be an action film starring an aging male star. Unlike these films, however, The Gunman would star Sean Penn and not Liam Neeson and this ended up having a major impact on the film’s script and central performance. Because of its rather crude usage of what one critic has dubbed the “geriaction” subgenre (Lynne 2013) formula/high concept along with representational tendencies that typify those of Studiocanal’s popular genre cinema on the whole, The Gunman is an ideal case study for illustrating many of the company’s films’ tendencies during this period. Like Unknown, the film was putatively based on a pulpy European novel (The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette) but this novel had also already been adapted in 1982 into Le Choc (Robin Davis), a film to which Studiocanal owned the rights. For whatever legal reason, the film does not credit the previous version of the novel as a source. Besides this standard Studiocanal practice of remaking/readapting source material, the film is also an ideal case study for understanding Studiocanal’s other popular genre practices. All told, The Gunman was one of the most important failures of the contemporary period for Studiocanal and recounting the film’s production history and ultimate commercially disappointing release in 2015 will allow us to illuminate and analyze some of the many pitfalls that greeted an aspiring, yet inexperienced, studio with global ambitions. In some ways the production of The Gunman followed nearly the exact same lines as those outlined in the discussion of Unknown: the deal had Studiocanal financing a Joel Silver production (now operating under his Silver Pictures

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label), with some legal gymnastics involved to make it qualify as a European coproduction. Instead of German partners, Spanish producers Nostromo Pictures and Oceano Media came on board the project in financial and location services capacities. This made the film eligible for numerous production incentives from the federal agency in Spain (the ICAA) and the provincial government of Catalonia (Hopewell and Mayorga 2013). Whatever questions may arise about the appropriateness of this being classified as a Spanish co-production in spirit—it seems unlikely there would be a lot of creative input from Nostromo or Oceano on the project—the location shooting in Barcelona was a boon to the local economy which was in 2013 (the time of initial photography) reeling from the effects of Spain’s financial crisis. With this complex funding in place, the American production company hired a team of above-the-line talent that were European citizens, including director Pierre Morel, cinematographer Flavio Labiano, composer Marco Beltrami, and most of the main acting roles aside from Sean Penn. Morel in particular was well known for his achievements in the action film genre, having directed Taken and other high-profile EuropaCorp works such as District B13 (2002) and From Paris with Love (2010) and indeed has been one of the core talents on the popular genre side of Studiocanal’s activities in the period. Besides directing this film, he has also been involved in the development of two projects, including a television series for Tandem (Lionhearts) and a potential film franchise in the adaptation of the Tom Wood Victor the Assassin books. Even if the film was a product of the collaboration of a number of European artists, the American star was once again central to the creative aspects of the film. Sean Penn, who here took on the role of the middle-aged action hero that in other films of the period has gone to the likes of Liam Neeson or Idris Elba, also became involved in writing and producing the film. This led to clashes with producer Joel Silver who left the project during postproduction and had his name removed from the credits (Masters 2015). Whether because of his augmented created role or not, Penn’s onscreen presence dwarfed those of his castmates, with second-billed star Elba for instance appearing over an hour into the film. Much, arguably too much, was made visually of Penn’s newly muscular physique with a number of questionable scenes in terms of narrative economy to be found which seem to exist solely to show Penn shirtless. A particularly odd and from a narrative point of view completely gratuitous example is a scene in which Penn is shown surfing at dawn in the Congo, a pastime that is never explicated or made use of during the rest of the film (see Figure 14).

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Figure 14 An absurdly unnecessary shot of Sean Penn shirtless in The Gunman.

As damaging as these were in the eyes of critics—and many devoted substantial sections of their reviews to cataloging and ridiculing these scenes— perhaps more damaging to the film’s commercial prospects was the way in which Penn’s persona as an outspoken advocate on behalf of poor and disadvantaged peoples was inserted into the film in a way that did not mesh well with this genre, which tends toward a very conservative worldview and whose patrons tend to seek escapist, “mindless” spectacle. Writing in Variety critic Guy Lodge aptly described the film as “Covering similar stylistic territory to Morel’s megahit Taken, with notional political context tacked on to fit its leading man’s public persona” and then points out the problems with such a contradictory high concept, “this curious blend of exploitation pic and vanity project certainly won’t be inaugurating an equivalent franchise” (2015a). However much Penn’s presence may have loomed over the film textually and otherwise, another problem encountered, this time for Courson and Studiocanal, during production was Silver himself. Before the bust up with Penn, the famously volatile producer reportedly had a falling out with Studiocanal executives who were refusing him advances on the profits from Non-Stop and questioning the seemingly extravagant pay allotted to the film’s stars (specifically the $5 million paid to Bardem for only appearing in half of the film) (Masters 2015). Silver’s spending pushed the film’s budget to a reported $50 million before production incentives, leaving Studiocanal fuming at the supposed lack of financial discipline on Silver’s part (an interesting echo of the problems the company used to have

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with Carolco). But this is perhaps where the company displayed some naivete as Silver was (and remains) notorious for his overspending on projects (as well as his hot temper), often ignoring the complaints of studio bosses in the process (Masters 2015). It was precisely this problem that led the producer to Studiocanal’s door in the first place as many were closed to him in the early 2010s as the majors collectively cut back on overheads and production, forcing producers to find other partners outside of the traditional studio system. Studiocanal would, following this debacle, cease to work with Silver, instead helping his lieutenants Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman to form their own company, which set out to make precisely the kind of films for which Silver is famous. In representational terms, the film’s treatment of the cultures it depicts is riddled with clichés and stereotypes. For all of Penn’s supposed sympathies for the nation and its plight, the Congo seen in the film is a continuation of the stereotypical construction of Africa as a land plagued by poverty, corruption, and political chaos. Perhaps more damningly, it is also yet again, for the umpteenth time in film history, a place where only the white characters’ lives matter. As the film’s action leads the characters across Europe, we see a consistent pattern of introducing new locations by means of bird’s-eye view establishing shots that display the appropriate tourist locales in London (the London Eye, Tower Bridge, etc.; we later see characters sat in offices with St. Paul’s and the Shard as their backdrops) and in Barcelona (the Sagrada Familia cathedral and Sagrat Cor on Tibidabo Mountain). Even Gibraltar is seen from overhead in terms of its most famous feature, the Rock itself. Once we move to the Spanish countryside, a gunfight breaks out in yet another tourist-cliché locale for that space: a wine cellar. Finally the film reaches its narrative climax in a bull ring in central Barcelona, the ultimate clichéd way of seeing Spain. The degree to which this is a calculated decision to represent the nation in ahistorical ways is evident from the film’s acknowledgement in the credits that bullfighting is actually banned in Barcelona and had been for several years before the film was made. Whether it be because of poor execution in a number of facets (besides the issues surrounding Penn, the film was found by most reviewers to be predictable in terms of genre formula, shallow in terms of character development and tonally out of keeping with generic expectations) or simply because of genre fatigue with the “geriaction” film, The Gunman performed very poorly at the box office. The film ultimately grossed only $24 million on its reported budget of $50 million before incentives; within Studiocanal’s territories, the film only grossed $4 million. The board at Vivendi was said to be very unhappy with the

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outcome of this project in particular and the timing of this debacle could not have been worse for then CEO Olivier Courson. Bolloré began his shakeup of Canal Plus in the summer following The Gunman’s release, a shakeup that would ultimately lead to the replacement of Courson, with a link between the two events being hinted at in the trade press (Jaafar and Tartaglione 2015). Despite this change of leadership, the company has continued to develop and produce similar films to The Gunman, though at the time of writing Neeson is back as the star of choice, meaning that the genre and indeed many of the creative talents involved in the film—including producers Rona and Heineman, some of the stars (Elba in particular) and director Morel—will likely continue to be fixtures on Studiocanal’s slate.

Conclusions: Studiocanal and European Studios Then, Now, and in the Future

This book has sought to provide an overview of the development of Studiocanal from its origins as a virtual investment fund for Hollywood features into a vertically and horizontally integrated studio competing for a substantial share of the global markets for film and television. Along the way, we saw the company struggle with many challenges and dilemmas that faced its historical predecessors dating back to the very beginnings of cinema. The book also provided a detailed discussion of the company’s production tendencies in this period of integration and international expansion, not only showing the company’s favored artistic formulas but also highlighting some of their key artistic collaborators while also taking note of some of the problematic ideological tendencies apparent in that body of work and at times the equally problematic business practices deployed by the studio itself. In this final chapter of the book, I would like to make some concluding observations about the state of globally oriented European cinema and television and Studiocanal’s place therein.

The persistence of fragility This book began with a discussion of one of the best years in recent memory for European cinema and television in 2014, but we should not see the story of a Studiocanal and its contemporaries as an unproblematically triumphant one. Some three years later after that high point in 2014, we have yet to see a repeat of those achievements and instead have seen a number of the confederated studios struggle to some extent or another. EuropaCorp has perhaps suffered the most among the group, with the high-profile failure of Valerian at the international box office capping a torrid 2017 which saw the company close its US distribution operation after losses mounted on failed releases such as Shut In (Farren Blackburn, 2016), Nine Lives (Barry Sonnenfeld, 2016), and Transporter Refueled. After signing over its remaining pipeline to American independent

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STX, it saw The Circle (James Ponsoldt, 2017), Their Finest (Lone Sherfig, 2017), and Valerian all flop stateside. Budgeted at $180 million, the largest total for any European film ever, the latter film grossed $45 million in America and about $200 million globally. This figure may have been impressive in light of the grosses discussed in the opening chapter, but it did not come close to the numbers that EuropaCorp needed for the film to break even, never mind turn a profit. Having reported major losses in 2016 and 2017, the company now faces questions about its ability to stay in business. From a historical point of view, it would be tempting to compare Valerian to Metropolis and thus blame EuropaCorp for overreaching with this one film, but the more appropriate historical precedent would actually be something like PFE. It was not just one film that has brought EuropaCorp to its present crisis, but instead the multiple films it released in the US market, meaning that the company just wasn’t prepared for the financial realities of competing in that market. As PFE learned, this can be a money-losing operation even when you have hit films, never mind when all of your films disappoint. This realization helps to vindicate the more conservative strategies of Studiocanal and other European studios who have sought to avoid the mistakes made by predecessors dating back throughout film history by avoiding direct competition in the American market. EuropaCorp is not alone in facing existential questions, however, as Wild Bunch’s share price fell to nearly zero in 2016 and trade press reports around the time of writing indicate that the company is looking to recapitalize and possibly sell off all of its operations (Keslassy 2017b). The gradual decline of the company, which was hastened by the merger with Germany’s Senator Films in 2015, can perhaps be seen as a reminder of the difficulties of achieving vertical and horizontal integration as the company has not been able to make its three segments work together in the synchronous way Studiocanal has. More specifically, the company has had particular difficulty keeping its film and television distribution businesses going. Struggles in this area have overshadowed critical successes such as I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, 2016), Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016), and numerous others that the company has helped to produce and market. While this could be a management failure, just not knowing how to run these businesses correctly, it could also be a matter of a broader industrial problem when it comes to middle and highbrow film and television, the segments of the market Wild Bunch specializes in. If this is the case, then Studiocanal’s decision in the early 2000s to adhere to popular genres and middlebrow films, a decision that led Wild Bunch’s leaders to leave the company and go independent, may have been a very wise one from an economic point of view if not necessarily an artistic one.

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Wild Bunch’s struggles are further reminders that the prestige film continues to be a very difficult film to make in a sustainable fashion, helping directly or indirectly to push European studios generally toward middlebrow and popular genre production as well as greater investments in television. Such are the main fields of the three remaining European studios. Pathé mainly focuses on middlebrow fare, with biopics and historical films (e.g., The Viceroy’s House [Gurinder Chadha, 2017], Florence Foster Jenkins [Stephen Frears, 2016], others) or relatively popular auteur works (e.g., The Great Beauty [Paolo Sorrentino, 2013] making up the entirety of its international slate. Studiocanal, as we have seen borrows a little from all these business plans, making the middlebrow works typical of Pathé and Wild Bunch while also following the lower brow strategies of EuropaCorp, all while looking more and more to television. Such is to be expected considering the realities of the global film and television industries to which these studios must adapt.

Studiocanal in the age of the Bollorés Fragility thus remains firmly entrenched in the European film and television sector, even if the confederated companies are substantially more stable than the many smaller companies that have collapsed in years past. Studiocanal is no exception in this regard as revenue has fallen steadily in the years following the high water mark of 2015, when revenue from the hits of 2014 was recorded. That these declines have come since Vincent Bolloré took control of Vivendi and summarily dismissed or later failed to retain much of the management structure of the company may or may not be a coincidence. Between the release of Shaun the Sheep Movie and Paddington 2 over two years later, the company only had one film gross more than $100 million internationally, that being Bridget Jones’s Baby, which the company only released in two of its territories. During that time a range of films have underperformed expectations, including Our Kind of Traitor ($10.7 million), A Bigger Splash ($7.5 million), and Gold (under $10 million). Others have barely received any release at all in most markets, including The Program and Bastille Day, the latter of which was pulled from theaters and France and saw its US release cut drastically after the Bastille Day terror attack in Nice in 2016. The change in management regimes also disrupted the production pipeline as at least one film, Working Title’s Entebbe, was dropped by Studiocanal after the previous management team had developed the project. As

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has been discussed previously, the new team also alienated at least one producer, nWave, which broke ties with Studiocanal in May of 2017 complaining that the new regime’s greenlighting process was moving too slowly. Late 2017 and early 2018 saw Paddington 2 perform well commercially but below the levels of the original film (grossing $225 million in comparison to nearly $270 million for the first film) and the Liam Neeson star vehicle The Commuter likewise fared less well than Non-Stop (approximately $120 million compared to $225 million for the 2014 release). Studiocanal is by no means immune from the instability that plagues the contemporary period of European film history, nor that which has plagued all of the periods of European film history. The flowering of 2014 could easily become yet another false dawn for the continent as precarity remains the rule. It thus remains to be seen if the high points recorded in that year were an exception, or the beginning of long-term fundamental change that will see European studios become permanent fixtures of the global screen industries.

Looking forward: Anglicization in the film industry, glocal television boom However the new crop of films perform or however those of the European studios fare, having surveyed the output of Studiocanal in this book it is clear that European cinema is becoming something more and more akin to American cinema in terms of its reliance on genres, the domestication of auteur directors, the deployment of stars, and the use of the English language. In this latter sense at least, it is possible to finally admit that, in the case of contemporary Europe at least, Louis B. Mayer was right in 1928 when he predicted that the introduction of sound and the popularity of Hollywood films would make the rest of the world learn to speak English (quoted in Puttnam 1997, 142). This may be dismaying in some ways, but it is also helping to create a more sustainable European cinema than has existed in Europe during the last century of filmmaking on the continent. We can, and will at the end of this conclusion, debate the necessity of having a European studio, but if we are to have one at all in the market conditions that currently, we must accept such Anglicization will be an inevitable byproduct of such a studio, just as it has been apparent in many coproductions over the years, what I have argued were forerunners to the works of the confederated studios.

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Regardless of how the film slate shakes out at Studiocanal or what European film looks and sounds like in years to come, television continues to grow in volume as the company in 2017 had nearly 200 hours of television drama on the air. As yet this does not seem to be compensating entirely for the drop off in film revenue, but this diversification does seem to be of increasing importance to the company as problems continue to plague the film slate. This reliance on television is very typical of the sector as a whole, with only Pathé not diversified in some form or another into television drama. It is also typical of many of the American “mini-majors” such as Lionsgate. Given the growth of television drama during the era of “Peak Television” we may be at a tipping point in which film becomes of decreasing importance to all studios going forward. With the long history of the imbrication of fi lm and television in Europe this will not perhaps come as a shock, but nevertheless it will mark a historic transition in the industries as television, long seen as a support mechanism for film, may actually become the leading industry in terms of prestige and earnings power. Another very interesting aspect of European television drama in this period is that it is not as dependent on the English language as its film counterpart is. Bambú makes programs in Spanish exclusively, a decision taken after the creative and commercial failure of Refugees (Antena 3/BBC, 2015), a coproduction made with BBC Worldwide that proved a failure in terms of critical reception and viewership ratings (Neira 2017). SAM likewise has thus far only made series in Danish, even though Foldager has indicated that the company has several English-language series in development (Meir 2016b, 48). Moreover, Studiocanal has been involved in other series in French, Danish, Italian, and Icelandic, broadly targeting such series at the middlebrow market, as shown in Chapter 5, whereas Spanish-language series have been aimed at more broadbased mainstream audiences in the Spanish-speaking world. There is thus perhaps more hope of linguistic and cultural diversity continuing to be fostered by European studios via their television output rather than by their films. If the economics of the contemporary screen industries point to greater television production, the more culturally progressive potential inherent in that medium might just mean that European studios will be able to utilize their movement into television as an opportunity to also make more positive impacts on images of Europe and European audiences than would have been allowed by working in film exclusively.

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Do we need European studios? The ability of European studios to make positive changes in the global image markets—be it in terms of better images of the continent, contributions to the linguistic diversity of Europe, or employing and developing European talent, or whatever—brings us to the thorny question that has faced many historians of European cinema. Do we actually need or want European studios? Yes, European studios can now exist in ways that they could not in the past, but what purpose do they serve? This book’s case studies in Studiocanal production in the contemporary period has shown that more opportunities are afforded to European directors, screenwriters, and stars, but this is not evenly dispersed across European nationalities. Studiocanal’s production policies overwhelmingly favor British creative talent, cultural content, and production companies. Ranking second in preference when it comes to production are American firms. Production companies from outside these two countries seldom participate in Studiocanal’s internationally oriented film production, with Belgium’s nWave being the only regular production partner throughout Courson’s tenure, but now of course that has ended. Similar observations can be made regarding Entertainment One, which deals almost exclusively with American producers, and Pathé whose films with global aspirations are almost always their Britishproduced works. Wild Bunch is alone among this group in backing a wide variety of filmmakers, particularly in their sales operations, but even they are currently dedicating more and more resources to their Anglophone-oriented sales subsidiary IMR, a company which will likely focus on working with American and British producers. These studios are thus more British in their orientation than they are pan-European, and besides the obvious cultural problems inherent in this version of Europeanness this may cause problems in the uncertain landscape of the post-Brexit European Union. Again, these cultural problems are less pronounced in the realm of television production, but they are not altogether absent either. As long as Anglophone television drama is the most lucrative form of drama, you can be sure the European studios will continue to direct most of their attention there, even if they are active in other languages as well. In this sense we can remember that corporations cannot be relied upon or expected to change the underlying dynamics of capitalism and should instead be expected to reflect those dynamics, which is something that these studios do very well. The economic basis of the global screen industry is shifting from only

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being centered in Los Angeles and this is creating more opportunities to make and sell content by others outside of the traditional Hollywood elite. This has to be, in some way or another, an inherently good thing, even if it is not as good as many of those who had hoped for the end of Hollywood domination would have perhaps liked to see. Such utopian hopes will naturally be disappointed when greeted with a stream of star-driven genre and middlebrow fare, two forms of production that have long been the bane of professional critics and scholars, never mind the remakes that Studiocanal in particular has a strategic interest in making and which will draw the ire of many who oppose the very idea of remaking films. But if such studios are indeed sustainable in the long term we could move ever closer to another ideal, one which if not truly global in its production practices, is at least multicentric. Yes, Hollywood studios could have nurtured and did in fact contribute to varying extent to the careers of Jaume Collet-Serra, Benedict Cumberbatch or Luca Guadagnino, or any number of others who have worked with Studiocanal or the other European studios over the years, but the chances of their emergence would have been dramatically lessened if this multitude of companies were not there. As was seen at the outset of this book, Europe has not been able to muster such stability and has consistently seen its talent migrate abroad or labor in relative obscurity and deprived of the resources, including audiences that this talent needs. Ultimately, the world media landscape is better off with the existence of these European studios and the challenge remains for scholars to continue to account for their historical significance and industrial and cultural influence.

Appendix 1: International Films and TV Dramas Made by Studiocanal, 2009–17

The following list indicates the titles included in this book’s study of Studiocanal’s international expansion in the late 2000s and 2010s. This list is constituted of what I consider to be the works created by Studiocanal during this period for a pan-European, international audience. As such it includes a range of types of investment by Studiocanal into the films in question, including coproduction, multiple-territory acquisition, and sales rights acquisitions. For more detail on these specific arrangements, a rationalization of my exclusion of locally oriented, non-Anglophone works, as well as my reasoning for considering these specific works to be my analytical objects, see Chapter 5.

2009 Film: Chloe (Atom Egoyan)

2010 Films: The Tourist (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck), The Last Exorcism (Daniel Stamm), Sammy’s Adventures (Vincent Kesteloot and Ben Stassen)

2011 Films: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Thomas Alfredson), Unknown (Jaume Collet-Serra), Brighton Rock (Rowan Joffé), Attack the Block (Joe Cornish), The Awakening (Nick Murphy), And Soon the Darkness (Marcos Ephron)

2012 Films: Deadfall (Stefan Ruzowitzky), Sightseers (Ben Wheatley), Fast Girls (Regan Hall), The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance), The Dinosaur Project (Sid Bennett), Sammy’s Adventures 2 (Vincent Kesteloot and Ben Stassen), The Factory (Morgan O’Neill)

2013 Films: The Last Exorcism 2 (Ed Gass-Donnelly), Anna (Jorge Dorado), In Fear (Jeremy Lovering), Thunder and the House of Magic (Vincent Kesteloot and Ben Stassen), Inside

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Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen), I Give It a Year (Dan Mazer), The Look of Love (Michael Winterbottom), Alan Partridge (Declan Lowney), Love, Marilyn (Liz Garbus), African Safari (Ben Stassen), The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Felix Herngren) TV Dramas: Crossing Lines Series 1 (Tandem)

2014 Films: Non-Stop (Jaume Collet-Serra), Paddington (Paul King), Serena (Susanne Bier), Before I Go to Sleep (Rowan Joffé), The Two Faces of January (Hosein Amini), Cuban Fury (James Grifiths), Robocop (José Padilha), El Niño (Daniel Monzón) TV Dramas: Crossing Lines Series 2 (Tandem), Happy Valley Series 1 (Red), Scott and Bailey Series 3 (Red), Last Tango in Halifax Series 3 (Red), The Driver (Red), Prey Series 1 (Red)

2015 Films: Shaun the Sheep Movie (Richard Starzak and Mark Burton), We Are Your Friends (Max Joseph), Legend (Brian Helgeland), The Gunman (Pierre Morel), Heidi (Alain Gsponer), The Emperor’s New Clothes (Michael Winterbottom), Man Up (Ben Palmer), A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadanigno), A War (Tobias Lindholm), The Program (Stephen Frears), Macbeth (Justin Kurzel) TV Dramas: Crossing Lines Series 3 (Tandem), Spotless Series 1 (Tandem), Pirate’s Passage (Tandem), Last Tango in Halifax Series 4 (Red), Scott and Bailey Series 4 (Red), Danny and the Human Zoo (Red), Cucumber, Banana and Tofu (Red), Prey Series 2 (Red), Ordinary Lies Series 1 (Red), The Last Panthers (Canal Plus commission [CPC])

2016 Films: Bastille Day (James Watkins), Robinson Crusoe (Vincent Kesteloot), Our Kind of Traitor (Susanna White), Eight Days a Week (Ron Howard), Bridget Jones’s Baby (Sharon Maguire), Gold (Stephen Gaghan) TV Dramas: Happy Valley Series 2 (Red), Last Tango in Halifax Series 5 (Red), Scott and Bailey Series 5 (Red), Ordinary Lies Series 2 (Red), Paranoid (Red), The Five (Red), Crazyhead (Urban Myth), Section Zéro (CPC), Baron Noir (CPC), Midnight Sun (CPC), The Teach (CPC)

2017 Films: Paddington 2 (Paul King), Madame (Amanda Sthers), The Lost City of Z (James Gray), Son of Bigfoot (Vincent Kesteloot), Terminator 2 3D Re-release (James Cameron)

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TV Dramas: Trust Me (Red), Rides Upon the Storm (SAM), Below the Surface (SAM), Something’s Rockin’ (SAM), Las chicas del cable (Bambú), Tiempos de la Guerra (Bambú), Baron Noir Series 2 (CPC), Velvet Colección (Bambú), The Lawyer (SF Studios), The Child in Time (Sunny March), Lo que es la verdad esconde: El caso Asunta (Bambú), Fariña (Bambú), En tierras salvajes (Bambú), The Teach (CPC), La Porta Rossa (Velafilm), Cazadores de trolls (Bambú), Traición (Bambú)

Appendix 2: Film and Television Drama Projects Developed by Studiocanal, 2006 Onwards

The following titles have been said to be in development by Studiocanal and production partners, in some cases including broadcast networks. All titles are listed here with the production company involved in the project, when known, as well as with the date of their latest mention in trade press discourses or interviews conducted by the author. Unless otherwise indicated, my source for these titles being in development are articles in one or more of following publications: Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline Hollywood, Screen International, The Tracking Board, Broadcast and in the cases of Spanish titles, Vertele.

Films The Apollo Theater Project (2016)—White Horse Pictures The Ax (2010)—Lion Rock A Boy Called Christmas (2016)—Blueprint Pictures Cash Truck (2012)—Silver Pictures Category 5 (2016)—Original Pictures Cliffhanger (2014)—Original Pictures Coldheart (2016)—Parkes + McDonald The Commuter (2017)—The Picture Company and Ombra Films A Complete History of My Sexual Failures (2009)—Original Pictures Conjure Wife1 (2015)—Grand Electric The Dam Busters (2016)—WingNut Productions Danger Mouse (2015)—Original Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation Don’t Look Now (2015)—The Picture Company Drug War (2017)—The Picture Company and Ombra Films Easy Money (2014)—Svensk Filmindustri Entebbe2 (2016)—Working Title Escape from New York (2017)—The Picture Company and Fox The Fallen Idol (2016)—Parkes + McDonald

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French Riviera (2013)—Les Armateurs The Great Pretender (2016)—Parkes + McDonald The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2017)—Mazur/Kaplan and Blueprint Pictures Hard Powder (2017)—Shamberg and Paradox Hindenburg (2016)—Parkes + McDonald Holy Lands (2017)—Made in PM How to Stop Time (2017)—Sunny March The Last Battle (2017)—The Picture Company The Last Letter from Your Lover (2017) Let it Fall Back (2017)—Frenesy/Sunny March/Nine Stories Life and Death in Eden3 (2015)—Grand Electric The Little Vampire (2016)—Autochenille and Panache Longbourn (2016)—Random House Productions The Magic Faraway Tree (2017)—Neal Street and Hachette Children’s Group Max and the Junkmen (2010)—Lion Rock The Mercy (2017)—Blueprint Pictures Mia and the White Lion (2015)—Galatee Films Nekome4 (2015)—Grand Electric Night in Hatton Garden (2017)—Working Title Paddington 3 (2016)—Heyday Films The Paris Architect (2016)—The Picture Company Paris for One (2017) Prize of Peril5 (2015)—Grand Electric Psycho Killer (2010)—Strike Entertainment Radioactive (2017)—Working Title The Red Circle (2014)—GK Films and Arthur Sarkissian Productions Retribution (2017)—The Picture Company and Ombra Films Sana (2015)—Original Pictures Le Sauvage (2012)—Abandon Pictures The Secret Garden (2016)—Heyday Films Shaun the Sheep 2 (2016)—Aardman Animations The Siege (2015)—Kudos and Shine Smiley's People6 (2016)—Working Title Thin Skinned Animal (2017)—Working Title The Third Man (2010) Three Miles North of Molkom (2016)—Blueprint Pictures The Tracking of a Russian Spy (2017)—The Picture Company Transatlantik (2016)—The Picture Company and Circle of Confusion Victor the Assassin: The Killer (2014)—The Picture Company The War Magician (2016)—Storyscape, Lonetree, and Sunny March

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The White Island (2014)—Svensk Filmindustri Yardie (2017)—Green Door/Warp Untitled Musical Remake Project—Monumental Pictures Untitled Pavarotti Documentary—White Horse Pictures Untitled Shackleton Biopic Project (2016)

TV Series Anansi Boys (2014)—Red Productions and the BBC Act of Valor (2013)—Tandem Productions and Relativity Media The Ambassador (2014)—Svensk Filmindustri Billy Liar (2013)—Tandem Productions and Red Productions The Boys (2016)—Red Productions and Channel 4 Brazza (2016)—Tandem Productions, Green Door Entertainment, and Save Ferris Breaking Off (2013)—Tandem Productions Butterfly (2017)—Red Productions and ITV Code to Zero (2016)—Tandem Productions Come Home (2017)—Red Productions and BBC One Deep City (2017)—Tandem Productions and Universal Music Group Fariñ a (2017)—Bambú and Antena 3 Katla (2017)—RUK Lionhearts: The Crusade (2015)—Tandem Productions, Cochran Productions, and the BBC Melrose (2017)—Sunny March TV with Two Cities Productions, Sky Atlantic and Showtime Monster’s Shrink (2017)—Red Productions with Canal Plus Noah Can’t Even (2017)—Urban Myths Films Nox (2017)—Gaumont and Canal Plus Paddington (2017) Pelle the Conqueror (2017)—SAM Productions and HBO Nordic Pompeii—Tandem Productions The Portrait of a Lady (2016)—Red Productions and Number 9 Films Pros and Cons (2017)—SAM Productions and ViaPlay Probable Cause7 (2015)—Tandem Productions, Lionsgate, ABC, TF1, and RTL Quatermass (2016)—Red Productions, Hammer Films, and BBC America Rubber Ducks (2014)—Tandem Productions, Haut et Court, and Canal Plus Safe (2017)—Red Productions, Canal Plus, and Netflix Six Years (2016)—Final Twist Take Two (2016)—Tandem Productions, MilMar, ABC, RTL, and Frances Televisions

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The Wicker Man (2013)—Tandem Productions and Red Productions Untitled Camino Santiago Series (2016)—Bambú Producciones Untitled Chris Blackwell Series (2017)—Grand Electric and Propagate Untitled True Crime Docuseries (2017)—Bambú Producciones ZeroZeroZero (2017)—Cattleya and Canal Plus

Notes Introduction 1 This book grows out of a larger research project which has received funding from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement nº 600371, el Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (COFUND2014-51509) el Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (CEI-15-17) and Banco Santander. 2 Unless otherwise noted, all box office figures, when expressed as quantities of US dollars, throughout the book are taken from BoxOfficeMojo.com. Alternatively, if these figures are expressed as numbers of admissions, they are taken from the EU’s Audiovisual Observatory’s Lumiere Database. 3 This list does not include various regional entities such as those working in Scandinavia (e.g., SF Studios or TrustNordisk) or German-speaking Europe (e.g., Constantin). While such companies harbor international ambitions, they do not as yet work outside of limited geographic and linguistic spheres. What makes the four companies listed here distinct is that their business models attempt to cross linguistic, cultural, and geographic lines. 4 A “first look” deal is a preferential distribution arrangement in which a distributor has the first opportunity to finance and distribute whatever idea a producer develops. If the distributor declines to finance the project, the producer is permitted to take the idea to other studios. In exchange for this privilege, distributors typically pay a sum of money to the producer, which the producer then uses to finance overheads such as salaries for workers, office space, and the like. Such deals underpin most producer-distributor relationships in contemporary studio production.

Chapter 1 1 Thompson notes that Zukor claimed to have cofinanced Queen Elizabeth (1984, 26), which would make this specific transaction not purely an acquisition but instead a presale or co-production. This would imply more risk than a straight acquisition, but

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the basic principle of his dependence on an independently produced foreign film is nevertheless unaltered by this difference in deal structure. 2 For this account of De Laurentiis’s international career, I am indebted to Tim Adler’s discussion of the producer (2004, 69–106). There is, however, one inaccuracy in Adler’s account that I feel compelled to point out which is when he claims that De Laurentiis’s production company before DEG was vertically integrated, including distribution (73). This would not be true until he launched DEG in the mid-1980s. 3 Biskind recounts, for just one example, disputes between the studio and Peter Greenaway over the profits from The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, Her Lover (1989) (2004, 131–32). 4 See for instance a typical quote in this vein: “This was the fulfillment of a dream for me; never before had a European based studio had its own US distribution as well as distribution in all the major territories in the world” (Kuhn 2002, 88).

Chapter 2 1 See, for instance this passage Roger Ebert’s review of the film (1993a): “Movies like this are machines for involving us and thrilling us. Cliffhanger is a fairly good machine.” 2 The film’s insurers refused to indemnify the stuntman or the producers for the stunt, prompting Carolco to offer the stuntman this fee in exchange for the signing of a waiver stating that the stuntman’s family would not sue the producers if he was killed during the filming of the stunt. 3 xXx: The Return of Xander Cage grossed over $160 million in China, almost four times what it made in the United States. The Fate of the Furious (F. Gary Gray, 2017) made nearly $400 million there. Passengers made $45 million in the country. 4 Calculations are taken from the website “US Inflation Calculator” (http://www. usinflationcalculator.com/), which bases its figures on the US government’s consumer price inflation (CPI) index.

Chapter 3 1 For much of what follows on Messier and Canal Plus in this section of the chapter, I am indebted to Johnson and Orange’s definitive reporting on Messier during the Vivendi Universal rise and collapse (2004).

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Chapter 4 1 Perren’s original figures were tier 1: $60 million and above; tier 2: $3–$20 million, with a “mid-range” “danger zone” between $20 million and $60 million. Her figures are historically specific to the mid-1990s and I would argue that in the contemporary industrial landscape, tier 2 ends at approximately $60 million and the new danger zone is between $60 and $100 million. 2 For just a few examples of films made by European companies targeting this niche, see the original Taken (reported budget of $25 million), Lucy (reported budget of $40 million), Lo Impossible (reported budget of $45 million), and so on. 3 TWC arranged for pop stars Gwen Stefani and Pharrell Williams to write and record the song “Shine” for the film. The song plays over the film’s closing credits. 4 This is my own calculation from the revenues of €563 million reported for Studiocanal by Vivendi in that year (2016, 180). 5 While it is not a Studiocanal production or a show it is distributing, the recent Canal Plus commission Versailles is an instructive case in the economics of contemporary television drama. Canal Plus, the sole commissioner, paid only a third of the series’ €27 million budget, with the balance coming from a mix of presales, tax breaks, and the minimum guarantee/deficit financing from the show’s distributor (Jenkins 2015).

Chapter 5 1 Studiocanal did not release Macbeth in Australia or New Zealand owing to a special deal with the film’s producers, See-Saw, who are affiliated with Australian distributor Transmission Films and therefore habitually retain Australia and New Zealand distribution rights on their films. For more details on this production company and its integration with Transmission, see Meir 2014. 2 At the time of this writing, no updates on The Paris Architect have been forthcoming from Studiocanal or The Picture Company. Salmanpour was enlisted, however, by both the studio and the producers to cowrite the screenplay for The Tracking of a Russian Spy, which said to be going into production in the summer of 2017, indicating that this European writer is indeed reaping some benefits from his affiliation with the two companies. 3 I am here utilizing a distinction Constantine Verevis (2006, 11–12) makes, drawing on the work of Thomas Leitch, between the remake of a film and a new adaptation of a literary source which has been previously adapted by other filmmakers. 4 The film was not, in legal or commercial terms a remake of the series. Working Title, the film’s production company, had acquired the novel’s film adaptation rights from

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author John Le Carré, who had retained them even while selling the television rights to the BBC in the 1970s (Bevan 2016). 5 Television without Borders is an EU directive which requires that broadcasters ensure at least 50 percent of the content they air is of national or European origin. For more on the exact provisions of the rule, see Buchsbaum (2017, 64).

Chapter 6 1 See, for example, Mazdon’s discussion of foreign language television drama in Britain as constituting a significant part of middlebrow screen culture in that country since the boom in Scandinavian crime fiction on the BBC4 television network in the late 2000s (2016, 192–94). 2 For more on Aardman’s relationships with its various distribution partners, including Studiocanal, see Meir (2019).

Chapter 7 1 The four quadrants are thus younger males, older males, younger females, and older females. 2 Some of the fan complaints about the changes to the series going into season three can be seen on a message board dedicated to the series at http://www.tv.com/shows/ crossing-lines/reviews/.

Appendix 2 1 Newman 2015. 2 Studiocanal eventually withdrew from this film project and financing and distribution responsibilities were assumed by Participant Media. 3 Newman 2015. 4 Newman 2015. 5 Newman 2015. 6 Bevan 2016. 7 This is project was also for a time developed under the title of Sex, Lies and Handwriting.

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Index Aardman Animations 98, 103, 120, 157, 170–3, 192 Abbott, Paul 157 ABC 81, 107 action film 186–8 The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Báky) 25 affinitive transnationalism 28 African Safari (Stassen) 192 Akin, Fatih 126, 158 Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (Lowney) 127 Alfredson, Thomas 110, 141, 143–4, 146, 147, 156, 157, 159 Alibi.com (Lecheau) 120 Almodóvar, Pedro 36, 40 Altman, Rick 141 Amazon 91 Amazon Prime 99 The Ambassador (TV series) 110 Amelie (Jeunet) 40 American distributors, European producers and 31–3 Amiel, Jon 62, 63–6 Amini, Hosein 155 Anderson, Michael 132 And God Created Woman (Vadim) 32 And Soon the Darkness (Ephron) 182, 189, 194 Anglicization 211–13 Anglophone production 66 Antena 3 111 Anthony Zimmer (Salle) 104, 182, 197, 199 Antichrist (von Trier) 158 Anton Capital Entertainment 99, 106 Antonioni, Michelangelo 33 AOL Time Warner 73, 74, 91 Arcel, Nickolaj 158 Arthur Christmas (Smith and Cook) 171 Artist Pictures Group 75

Atlantis (TV series) 111 Attenborough, Richard 52 Aubyn, Edward St 164 August, Bille 109 auteur directors 39, 156–9 AVCO Embassy 37 The Awakening (Murphy) 189 Bac Films 82, 83 Back to Burgundy (Klapisch) 120, 158 Báky, Josef van 25 Balcon, Michael 29 Balio, Tino 3, 21, 31, 39, 42, 133 Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Dai) 81 Bambú Producciones 111, 116, 180–1, 185–6, 191, 212 Banana (TV series) 6, 107 Barber, Gary 75 Bardot, Brigitte 31 Barfoed, Kaspar 115, 158 Baron Noir (TV series) 6, 117, 162 Barrett, Julian 101 Barton Fink (Coen brothers) 48 Basic Instinct (Verhoven) 37, 52, 54, 61, 70 Bastille Day (Watkins) 187, 193, 211 Bauer, Rola 106–7, 200 BBC 117, 146 BBC America 108, 111 BBC One 1, 111 BBC Worldwide 6–7, 111, 117, 212 Bean (Smith) 41, 48, 76 Before I Go to Sleep (Joffé) 159, 183, 195 Being John Malkovich (Jonze) 41, 48 Bel Air Pictures 75 Below the Surface (TV series) 158 Bend It Like Beckham (Chadha) 5 Beneath the Surface (TV series) 107, 109 Benigni, Roberto 22 Benjamin, Robert 31 Bergfelder, Tim 2, 9, 18, 34, 155–6, 164

Index Bernero, Edward Allen 201 Bertolini, Francesco 21 Bertolucci, Bernardo 22, 32, 33, 40 Bessi, Romain 119, 120–1 Besson, Luc 1, 4, 58 The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Madden) 127 BesTV 104 Bevan, Tim 76, 150, 160, 168 Bier, Susanne 94, 158, 168, 176–9 A Bigger Splash (Guadagnino) 104, 137, 155, 158, 161–2, 166–7, 169, 184, 211 The Big Lebowski (Coen brothers) 76 Big Talk Pictures 80 Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Herek) 37, 69 Billy Elliot (Daldry) 77 biopics 164 Bird, Simon 108 Birnbaum, Robert 75 Black Narcissus (Powell and Pressburger) 29 The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sanchez) 189 Blood (Murphy) 135–6 Blow Up (Antonioni) 33 The Blue Angel (Sternberg) 25, 153–5 Blue Velvet (Lynch) 37, 69, 89 Boccaccio 70 (de Sica) 32 Bogdan, Goran 162 Bogdanovich, Peter 69 Boisset, Yves 182 Bolloré, Vincent 98, 118–21, 208, 210–11 Bonnell, René 51 Boonstra, Cor 43 Bordwell, David 152 Borgen (TV series) 109, 158 Bouchareb, Rachid 88 Boyle, Danny 5, 67 A Boy Named Christmas (Haig) 136, 163–4 Bradshaw, Peter 84 Brazza (TV series) 116 Breaking Bad (TV series) 112 Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Kidron) 79 Bridget Jones franchise 88

245

Bridget Jones’s Baby (Maguire) 78, 79, 128, 159, 190, 210–11 Bridget Jones’s Diary (Maguire) 77–80, 148 Brief Encounter (Lean) 29 Brighton Rock (Joffé) 136, 163, 184 British New Wave 31 British Screen 40 Brocklehurst, Danny 157 Brody, Adrien 83, 84 Bron/Broen (TV series) 109 Bron/Broen/The Bridge (TV series) 109 Bronfman, Edgar, Jr. 43, 73, 76, 85, 91 Bronson, Charles 38 Brooks, Mel 69 The Brothers McMullen (Burns) 153 Brunsdon, Charlotte 193 Buchsbaum, Jonathan 50–1 Buet, Rodolphe 119 Bullmore, Amelia 162 Bully (Clark) 81 Burn, Witch, Burn (Hayers) 189 Burns, Ed 153 Burton, Mark 95, 157, 170–3 Butterfly (TV series) 108 C8 108, 136, 195 Cabiria (Pastrone) 21 The Cable Girls (Netflix) 6, 111, 191, 193, 194 cable television 37 Cahiers du cinema 93 Caldwell, John Thornton 13 Cameron, James 37, 52, 57, 70, 104 Camping franchise 5 Campion, Jane 21, 136 Campos, Ramón 111 Canal Plus 1, 12, 44, 50–1. See also Studiocanal Canal Plus DA 68, 70–1, 72, 76 Cannan, Robert 190 Cannes Film Festival 82 Cannon Group 37, 38, 70 Capps, Johnny 110–11 Carol (Haynes) 163 Carolco Pictures 37–8, 51–8 Carpenter, John 62, 69, 104, 185, 198 Carrington (Hampton) 48, 67 Caruso, D. J. 57

246

Index

case study Bridget Jones’s Diary (Maguire) 77–80 Cliffhanger (Harlin) 54–8 Crossing Lines (TV series) 199–204 The Gunman (Morel) 204–8 Happy Valley (TV series) 173–6 Paddington (King) 98–103 The Pianist (Polanski) 82–5 Serena (Bier) 176–9 Shaun the Sheep Movie (Starzak and Burton) 170–3 Sommersby (Amiel) 63–6 Stargate (Emmerich) 58–61 The Tourist (Donnersmarck) 197–9 Castle (TV series) 186, 204 Category 5 195 Cattaneo, Peter 40 Cawood, Catherine 174, 175 Célérier, Stéphane 119, 120 Cesar and Cleopatra (Pascal) 29 CGI 100, 157, 170–1, 172 Chadha, Gurinder 5, 210 Chamueil, Pascal 114 Channel 4 40 Chaplin (Attenborough) 52 Chasin, Liza 77 Chauveron, Phillipe de 5 Chereau, Patrice 67 The Child in Time (TV series) 107, 110, 161 Chinatown (Polanski) 83 Chinese Puzzles (Klapisch) 158 Chinese theatrical market 8 Chioua, Brahim 87 Chloe (Egoyan) 90, 93–4, 134, 144, 153, 154, 155, 159, 169 Cianfrance, Derek 128, 162 Cinema Paradiso (Tornatore) 39 cinematographic machine 18 The Circle (Ponsoldt) 209 The Clan (Trapero) 157 Clarke, Will 105 Cliffhanger (Harlin) 52, 53, 54–8 Clocking Off (TV series) 157, 166 Coben, Harlan 108, 136, 183 Code to Zero (TV series) 183 Coen, Joel and Ethan 41, 48, 76, 89, 104, 158, 169, 174

Collet-Serra, Jaume 1, 94, 141, 143, 188, 189, 214 Collin, Robbie 173 Columbia Pictures 197 Columbia/TriStar Pictures 43 Comcast 74, 91 Come Home (TV series) 108, 157 The Commuter 120, 138, 139, 144, 180, 186, 187, 188, 195, 211 confederating distribution territories 5 Constantin 137 Contempt (Godard) 32–3, 69 Continental Distributors 32 Conviction (TV series) 136 Cooper, Bradley 162, 176, 178 Coppolla, Christopher 69 coproductions 33–6 employment and 149–50 legal 34 treaties 34 Coronation Street (TV series) 175 corporate trends 7 Costes-Cerdan, Nathalie 119 Cotillard, Marion 162 Council of Europe 34 Courson, Olivier 57, 93, 94, 98–9, 119–20, 138, 177, 184, 192, 198, 206, 208, 213 Crazyhead (TV series) 111, 189, 195 creative accounting 53 Credit Lyonnais 37, 38, 60 Criminal Minds (TV series) 186, 201–2 Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders (TV series) 201 Crimson Rivers 2 (Dahan) 88 Crossing Lines (TV series) 6, 114, 199–204 Crowe, Cameron 79 The Crown (Netflix) 164 Cruise, Tom 197 The Crying Game (Jordan) 21, 39, 40–1, 67 CSI (TV series) 201 Cuarón, Alfonso 99 Cuban Fury (Griffith) 80, 190 Cucumber (TV series) 6, 107, 166 Cumberbatch, Benedict 102, 110, 138, 139, 141, 144, 159, 160–1, 214

Index Curie, Marie 164 Curtis, Richard 77, 79 Dahan, Olivier 88 Dai, Sljie 81 Daldry, Stephen 77 Dalton Duty Act 29 Damage (Malle) 152 The Dam Busters (Anderson) 132 Dancer in the Dark (von Trier) 40 Danger Mouse 128 Danny and the Human Zoo (TV series) 157, 166 Dante, Joe 69 Dante’s Inferno (Bertolini and Padovan) 21 Dark Castle Productions 94, 143, 147, 187, 198 Darkness Falls (TV series) 201 Darmon, Audrey 13 David Brent: Life on the Road (Gervais) 10 Davidson, Jaye 59 Davidson, Kief 106 Davies, Andrew 79 Davies, Russell T. 107 Davis, Andrew 62 Davis, John 30 Days of Glory (Bouchareb) 88 Deadfall (Ruzowitzky) 94, 128, 158, 165, 169, 199 Death Wish (Winner) 37 Deep City (TV series) 116, 121, 204 deficit financing 112–13, 115 Defoe, Daniel 135 de Grazia, Victoria 23, 25, 27 Degruson, Jeremy 97 Delamarre, Camille 4 de la Torre, Dani 182 De Laurentiis, Dino 24, 33, 37 De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG) 37, 38, 68, 69, 70 Delon, Alain 31 Demme, Jonathan 65 Dencik, David 176 de Palma, Rossy 190 Depardieu, Gerard 65 Depp, Johnny 198

247

Deray, Jacques 104 Derrickson, Scott 161 Derufa 26 Desfontaines, Henri 20 de Sica, Vittorio 32 Devlin, Dean 60 Deyo, Nathaniel 146–7 Die Nibelungen (Lang) 24 Diesel, Vin 57 Dietrich, Marlene 23, 25, 154–5 Diller, Barry 74, 86 The Dinosaur Project (Bennett) 187, 194 Disciple of Death (Parkinson) 69 distribution 3–6, 10–12 reciprocal agreements 26, 27 District B13 (Morel) 205 Doctor Who (TV series) 6–7 Donner, Richard 64 Donnersmarck, Florian Henckel von 57, 94, 96, 104, 128, 148, 182, 197–9 Don’t Look Now 184–5, 189 The Doors (Stone) 52 Dracula’s Widow (Coppolla) 69 DreamWorks/Amblin 10, 62, 88, 149, 171 DreamWorks Animation 170, 191 The Driver (TV series) 107, 157 Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (Lang) 23 Dr. Strange (Derrickson) 161 Drug Wars 188 Ducournau, Julia 210 Dune (Lynch) 24, 37 du Welz, Fabrice 10 Dyer, R. 9 Dylan, Bob 165 E4 111 Eagle-Lion 28, 29 Ealing Studios 70 Early Man (Redmayne and Hiddleston) 103, 120, 138, 139, 157, 172 Earth Girls are Easy (Temple) 69 Eastwood, Clint 88 Easy Money (Espinosa) 110 EchoStar Communications 73 Edelman, Pierre 81

248 Edison, Thomas 18, 19 Efron, Zac 162 Eight Days a Week 164 Elba, Idris 187, 205 El Caso Asunta (TV series) 186 El desconocido (de la Torre) 182 Eleftheriotis, D. 9 Elizabeth (Kapur) 41, 48, 76 Elle (Verhoven) 22 El Niño (Monzón) 129, 130 Elsaesser, Thomas 7, 8, 9, 18, 35 Elstree Studios 38 Embassy Pictures 32, 69 EMI-Weintraub library 70 Emmerich, Roland 52, 60–1 Endfield, Cy 69 Entertainment One 5, 6, 10, 30, 113, 114, 213 En tierras salvajes (TV series) 181 Epic Films 45 Equinox 66, 67 Escape from New York (Carpenter) 69, 104, 185, 198 Espinosa, Daniel 110 Eurimages 34–5 Euro-American Cinema (Lev) 33 EuropaCorp 1, 3, 5, 6, 11, 21, 24, 56, 121, 205, 209, 210 distribution operation 4 instability at 24 international distribution 4 television production 6 European cinema American market and 8 coproduction and 33–6 geographic bias 9 historiography 7–9 writers 8–9 European Convention on Cinematographic Co-Production 34 European studios. See also specific studio brief history 17–49 coproduction 33–6 emergence of 2 First World War 18–22 Hollywood 31–3, 36–41 importance/need 213–14

Index Evil Dead 2 (Raimi) 69 The Exorcist (Friedkin) 100 The Expendables (Stallone) 57 Eye in the Sky (Hood) 10 The Factory (O’Neill) 194 The Family (Besson) 4 family fare 191–3 Fargo (Coen brothers) 41, 48, 76, 174 Farnaby, Simon 101 The Fast and the Furious franchise 58, 148 Faulkner, Sally 153, 155–6 Fawcett, Perry 164 Fellini, Federico 32 Fellner, Eric 76, 77, 79 Fellowes, Julian 198 Fernández-Valdez, Teresa 111 Fichtner, William 203 Fielding, Helen 78, 79, 80 Fiennes, Ralph 162, 166, 167 The Fifth Element (Besson) 58 Fight Club (Fincher) 62 Film Europe movement 26–7 film industry Anglicization 211–13 distribution 3–6 horizontal integration 6–7 production 3, 4 vertical integration 5–6 FilmNation 36 Final Twist 108, 136, 183 Fincher, David 48, 62, 112 First World War 18–22 Firth, Colin 78, 79, 138, 141, 144, 159–60 The Five (TV series) 107, 108, 136, 183, 195 Flood, Richard 202 Florence Foster Jenkins (Frears) 210 Flushed Away (Bowers and Fell) 170–1 Fly, Per 115, 158 Focus Features 39, 49, 83, 97, 147, 148 The Fog (Wainwright) 69, 89 Foldager, Meta Louise 109, 110, 158, 212 Follett, Ken 135 Fontaine, Anne 90 Forbrydelsen/The Killing (TV series) 109

Index Fortou, Jean-Renée 74, 87 Foster, Ben 162 Foster, Jodie 63, 65 Four Lions (Morris) 160 Four Weddings and a Funeral (Newell) 41, 48, 67, 76, 79 Fox Searchlight 39, 67 Framestore 100–1 Francisi, Pietro 32 Francophone films 5 Frears, Stephen 5, 76, 77, 95, 156, 168, 210 freelance producer 37 Free Willy (Wincer) 62, 63 Frères, Lazard 73 Friedkin, William 100 From Paris with Love (Morel) 205 From the Land to the Moon (Garcia) 120 Frost, Nick 80 Fukunaga, Cary 112 The Full Monty (Cattaneo) 40, 67, 127 Gaghan, Stephen 162, 211 Gainsbourg (Sfar) 115, 156 The Game (Fincher) 48 GameLoft 103 Garbo, Greta 23 Garbus, Liz 164 Garcia, Nicole 120 Garrett, Stephen 173–4 Gassot, Charles 67 Gaumont 5, 6, 19, 36 Générale des Eaux 73 General Electric 43, 74 General Film Corporation 19 genre works 180–96 action film 186–8 family fare 191–3 horror film 188–9 overview 180–1 romantic comedies and melodrama 190–1 sources 181–6 spatial representation 193–6 Gere, Richard 63, 65 German Federal Film Fund 149 Gervais, Ricky 10 Glenister, Robert 196

249

global markets 5–6 Globus, Yoram 37 Godard, Jean-Luc 32–3, 35, 38 Golan, Menaheim 37 Gold (Gaghan) 162, 211 Goldcrest 24 golden age of television drama 112–14 Golden Harvest 45 Goldman, Alain 87 Gondry, Michel 158 Goode, Matthew 80 Gordon, Mark 201 Gosling, Ryan 162 The Graduate (Nichols) 69 Gramercy 45, 46, 49 Grand Electric 105, 189 Grand Hotel (TV series) 111 Granik, Debra 176 Granpierre, Richard 87 Gran Reserva (TV series) 111 Grant, Hugh 79 Gravity (Cuarón) 99, 100 Gray, James 128 The Great Beauty (Sorrentino) 210 Great Depression 26 The Great Pretender 164 Greene, Graham 136, 163 Greengrass, Paul 88 Grey’s Anatomy (TV series) 6 Griffin, Robin 174 Griffith, James 80 Grimaldi, Alberto 18, 31–2 Grimond, Vincent 75–6, 86, 87 Guadagnino, Luca 104, 137, 158 The Guardian 84 Guback, Thomas 7 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society 183, 191 Guilty Party 108 Guinness, Alec 144 The Gunman (Morel) 120, 139–40, 182, 185, 187, 188, 193, 204–8 Haig, Matt 101, 136, 163–4 Halpern, Ronald 90, 120, 129 Hamer, Robert 30 Hamlet (Olivier) 29

250 Hampton, Christopher 48, 67 Haneke, Michael 36 The Hangover (Phillips) 176 Hannibal (TV series) 6 Hanson, Curtis 62 Happy Valley (TV series) 1, 6, 107, 108, 162, 166, 170, 173–6 A Hard Day’s Night (Lester) 31 Hard Powder 57, 120, 144, 180, 182, 188, 194 Hardy, Tom 138, 139, 141, 144, 146, 159, 160 Harlin, Renny 52 Harrelson, Woody 112 Harris, Naomie 162 Harrison Pictures 32 Harrod, Mary 2 Harry Potter films 99, 100 Harry Potter novels 103 Hayers, Sidney 189 Haynes, Todd 163 HBO 112 HBO Nordic 109 Heartbreaker (Chamueil) 114 Heat (Mann) 62 Heidi (Gsponer) 13, 120, 126, 192 Heineman, Alex 105, 149, 185, 188, 207, 208 Helgeland, Brian 94 Help! (Lester) 31 Henry, Lenny 157 Hercules (Francisi) 32 Herek, Steven 37 Herngren, Felix 129 Heyday Films 99–100, 148, 192 Heyman, David 94, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102 Higbee, Will 11, 12, 147 High Fidelity (Frears) 77 Highsmith, Patricia 182 Higson, Andrew 24, 27 Hilton, Paris 143 Hindenburg 164 historiography 7–9 Hjort, Mette 11, 12, 28, 147 Hoffman, Peter 52 Hollywood 4, 7, 31–3, 36–41 collaboration with 147–9 Holocaust 83, 84

Index Holy Lands (Sthers) 158 home video 37, 39 Hood, Gavin 10 Hooper, Tom 7 horizontal integration 6–7 horror film 188–9 Hors de moi/Out of my Head (Van Cauwelaert) 181–2 Houghton Mifflin publishing 73 House of Cards (Netflix) 112, 113 The House of Wax (ColletSerra) 143, 188 Howards End (Ivory) 22, 40, 67, 153 The Howling (Dante) 69 How to Stop Time (Haig) 136, 161, 164 Hoyt, Eric 44 Hoyts 94–5 Hugenberg, Alfred 23, 24–5 The Hundred-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (Herngren) 129 Hunger Games franchise 11 Huppert, Isabelle 22 Hurt, John 144, 162 I, Daniel Blake (Loach) 210 Ifans, Rhys 162, 176 I Give It a Year (Mazer) 80, 97, 190 Illegally Yours (Bogdanovich) 69 Il Postino (Radford and Troisi) 39 The Imitation Game (Tyldum) 129, 161 The Impossible (Bayona) 5 In a Better World (Bier) 177 Iñárritu, Alejandro 62 The Inbetweeners (TV series) 108 The Independent 78 industrial patterns coproduction and employment 149–50 Hollywood collaboration 147–9 Inland Empire (Lynch) 84, 85, 89, 152 In Order of Disappearance (Moland) 182 Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen brothers) 158, 162, 165, 169 international production 88–9 remakes and 89–90 Interscope 41 Intimacy (Chereau) 66–7, 81

Index King Lear (Godard) 38 The King of Comedy (Scorsese) 61 Kingsley International 32 The King’s Speech (Hooper) 7, 153, 156, 164 Kinowelt 94, 128, 149 Klapisch, Cedric 158 Kleine Optical 19 Klitzsch, Ludwig 25 Korda, Alexander 22, 159 Kormakur, Balthasar 158 Kotcheff, Ted 52 Kremeier, Klaus 7 Krim, Arthur 31 Kruger, Diane 142 Kubrick, Stanley 100 Kuhn, Michael 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 116 Kurzel, Justin 95, 127, 162, 163, 167

The Intouchables (Nakache and Toledano) 5 In Untamed Lands (TV series) 111 Irreversible (Noé) 82 Irvin, John 68 Isaac, Oscar 162 Island Pictures 41 ITV 6, 107–8, 117 Ivory, James 22, 40 The Ivory Game (Davidson and Ladkani) 106 Jacobi, Derek 162 Jacob’s Ladder (Lyne) 52 James, Henry 163 James Bond series 31 Jannings, Emil 23, 25 Janus Films 32 Jerry Maguire (Crowe) 79 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 40 JFK (Stone) 62, 63 Joffé, Roland 24 Joffé, Rowan 136, 163, 184 Johnny English (Howitt) 77 Johnson, Dakota 166 Jolie, Angelina 197, 198 Jones, Huw 35 Jones, January 143 Jones, Rashida 80 Jones, Suranne 162 Jones, Toby 176 Jonze, Spike 41, 48 Jordan, Neil 21, 39, 67 Journey into the Dark Ages (TV series) Kamasa, Zygi 115 Kandahar (Makmalbaf) 81 Kapur, Shekar 41, 48, 76 Karla Films 149 Kar-Wai, Wong 93 Kassar, Mario 37, 51–2, 70 Katla (TV series) 113, 158 Khouri, Calli 204 Kiarostami, Abbas 84 Kill List (Wheatley) 158 Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer) 29–30 King, Graeme 197

251

183

La 1 (TVE) 111 Labyrinth (TV series) 199 LA Confidential (Hanson) 62 Ladkani, Richard 106 The Ladykillers (Coen brothers) 89, 104 L’Alliance Cinématographique Européene 26 Lancashire, Sarah 162 “Landmark London” 193 Lang, Fritz 23, 24 Langella, Frank 143 La Piscine (Deray) 104, 184 La Porta Rossa (TV series) 113, 129 The Last Battle 164 The Last Command (von Sternberg) 155 The Last Emperor (Bertolucci) 33 The Last Exorcism (Stamm) 94, 105, 148, 180, 185, 189, 195 The Last King of Scotland (Macdonald) 127 The Last Letter from your Lover (Moyes) 184 The Last Panthers (TV series) 115, 117, 162, 167 Last Tango in Halifax (TV series) 157, 162, 166, 170, 175 Last Tango in Paris (Bertolucci) 22, 32, 33, 39

252

Index

Latin America 9 The Lavender Hill Mob (Crichton) 29 Lavoigne, Marc 203 Law, Jude 159 Law and Order (TV series) 201 Lawrence, Jennifer 162, 176, 178, 179 The Lawyer (TV series) 109–10 Leap Year (Tucker) 80, 197 Le Carré, John 136, 143, 159, 163, 182, 225 n.4 Le cercle rouge (Melville) 132 Le Doulos (Melville) 105 Le Film Francais 89 legal co-productions 34 Legend (Helgeland) 94, 95, 139, 160, 162, 164, 167, 169 Legendary Entertainment 62 Leone, Sergio 31 Leonormand, Roger 87 Lepidus, Jens 110 Le Prix du danger (Boisset) 182, 189 Le retour de Martin Guerre (Vigne) 64, 65 Lescure, Pierre 60, 74, 75, 85–6, 87 Les Intouchables (Gaumont) 36 Lester, Richard 31 Le Studio Canal Plus (LSC) 37–8, 51–70. See also Studiocanal Let it Fall Back (Guadagnino) 158 Let Me In (Reeves) 143 Let the Right One In (Alfredson) 143 Lev, Peter 33 Levine, Joseph 32–3 Lewis, Damian 162 library acquisitions 67–71 importance 103–5 Lie to Me (TV series) 203 Life and Death in Eden 189, 195 Life Is Beautiful (Benigni) 22, 40, 84 Lim, Song Hwee 11, 12, 147 Lindholm, Tobias 129, 158 Lionhearts: The Crusades (TV series) 115 Lionsgate 5, 212 Liotta, Ray 162 Lithgow, John 55

Little Buddha (Bertolucci) 40 Lively, Blake 143 The Lives of Others (Donnersmarck) 199 Liz, Mariana 2 Loach, Ken 36, 210 Lodge, Guy 206 Logo 107 Loncraine, Richard 80 A Long Way Down (Chamueil) 114 The Look of Love (Winterbottom) 127 Lopert and Kingsley International 39 Lord, Phil 58 Loren, Sophia 31 The Lost City of Z (Gray) 128, 129, 164, 169 Love, Actually (Curtis) 77, 79, 80 Love, Marilyn (Garbus) 164 Love in a Time of War (TV series) 191 Lowney, Declan 127 Lubitsch, Ernst 23 Lucy (Besson) 1, 4 Lumet, Sydney 37 Lund, Sara 174 Lupfer, Didier 119, 131, 136–7 Lynch, David 24, 37, 48, 80–1, 84–5, 89, 93 Lyne, Adrian 52 Macbeth (Kurzel) 95, 127, 162, 163, 167 Mackendrick, Alexander 70 Mackenzie, David 81 Macy, William H. 174 Madame (Sthers) 158, 190 Madame Dubarry (Lubitsch) 23 Madden, John 67, 127 The Magic Faraway Tree (Clarke) 192 Maguire, Sharon 77–80 Making a Murderer (Netflix) 186 Makmalbaf, Mohsen 81 Malle, Louis 152 Maltby, Richard 24 Mankell, Henning 110 Mann, Henrich 25 Mann, Michael 62 Man on Fire (Scott) 62 Man Up (Palmer) 80, 95, 190 Maraval, Vincent 87

Index Mark Gordon Company 6 Marlowe, Andrew 204 Marriage Italian Style (de Sica) 32 Mars Films 87, 88, 197 Marsh, James 164 Marshall, Gary 61, 65 Marvel Comics 163 Matsushita 43 Mayer, Louis B. 211 Mazdon, L. 64, 65, 225 n.1 Mazer, Dan 80 MCA 43 McCarthy, Todd 84 McColl, Hamish 101 McConaughey, Matthew 112, 162 McDonald, Laurie 149 McDonald, Paul 40 McEwan, Ian 163 McFarlane, Corinna 190 McGregor, Ewan 162 MCI Worldcom 74 McKenna, A. T. 33 McQueen, Steve 62 Me Before You (Sharrock) 184 Medavo, Mike 75 Medem, Julio 81 MEDIA program 34, 35 Media Rights Capital 62 Medici: Masters of Florence (TV series) 6 Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg 149 Mégaton, Olivier 1 Meheut, Bertrand 119 Melancholia (von Trier) 158 Méliès, Gaston 19 Méliès, Georges 19 melodrama 190–1 Melville, Jean-Pierre 70, 105 Memoirs of a Geisha (Marshall) 88–9 Memoirs of an Invisible Man (Carpenter) 62 Mendes, Eva 162 Menges, Chris 76 Merad, Kad 162 Mercanton, Luis 20 Merle, Patrick 14, 131

Message from the King (du Welz) 10 Messier, Jean-Marie 71, 73–4, 75, 82, 85–6, 87, 90, 91, 118 Meta Film 109 Metropolis (Lang) 24, 209 Meyer, Nicholas 63, 64, 65 Meyer, Ron 86 MGM 23, 33, 37, 38, 42, 45, 59–61, 67–8 Microbe and Gasoline (Gondry) 158 middlebrow cinema 152–79 acting 159–62 artistry and audiences 168–70 auteur directors and showrunners 156–9 case studies 170–9 defining and historicizing 153–6 source material 162–4 space, place, and representation 164–8 Midnight Sun (TV series) 117, 167–8, 169 Milchan, Arnon 61–2, 64, 75 Miller, Christopher 58 Miller, Terri Edda 203–4 Millman, Spencer 108 MIPTV 110, 111 Miramax 3, 20–1, 39, 40–1, 47, 49, 67, 80 Misfits (TV series) 111 The Mission (Joffé) 24 Mitterand, Francois 50 Moix, Yann 88 Mon Roi (Maïwenn) 126 Monster’s Shrink (TV series) 108, 115, 157 Mood Indigo (Gondry) 158 Moore, Julianne 155 Morel, Pierre 114–15, 204–8 Moretti, Nanni 81 Moritz, Neal 58, 148 Morocco: Love in the Time of War (TV series) 111 Morris, Chris 160 Morton, Samantha 162 Motion Picture Patents Corporation (MPPC) 19, 21

253

254 Motion Pictures Export Association 29 Mouglasis, Anna 162 Movistar+ 111 Moyes, Jojo 183–4 Mr. Bean’s Holiday (Bendelack) 88 Mulholland Drive (Lynch) 81, 84, 89 Mulligan, Carrie 162 multiple territory acquisitions (MTA) 129 Mumbai terrorist attack 164 Munden, Marc 159 Murnau, F. W. 23 Murphy, Julian 110–11 Murphy, Nick 135–6, 189 My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears) 76 My Blueberry Nights (Kar-Wai) 93, 121, 159 Myrick, Daniel 189 Narcos (Netflix) 6, 186 Nashville (TV series) 204 Nathalie… (Fontaine) 90, 134 nationalization 26–7 Nazis 25–6, 83–4 NBC 74, 200, 201, 203 NBCUniversal 74, 91, 201 Neale, Steve 152 Neeson, Liam 1, 38, 57, 84, 120, 138–9, 141, 142, 143, 144, 155, 159, 182, 185, 187, 188, 204, 205, 208, 211 Neira, Gema 186 Netflix 6, 91, 107, 108, 111, 112, 174, 186, 189, 191, 195 Newell, Mike 41, 48, 67, 76, 79 New Line 39 Newman, Eric 105, 106, 149, 189 The New York Times 51, 84 Nichols, Mike 69 Nimoy, Leonard 64 Nine Lives (Sonnenfeld) 209 Noah Can’t Even 193 Noé, Gaspar 82 Non-Stop (Collet-Serra) 1, 94, 128, 138–9, 144, 187, 188, 195, 204, 206, 211 Nordic Noir 109, 158 Noren, Saga 174

Index Norris, Chuck 38 Nostromo Pictures 205 Notting Hill (Michell) 79, 199 nWave 119, 134–5 Oceano Media 205 Oldman, Gary 87, 141, 144, 159 Olivennes, Denis 85 Ombra Films 105, 188, 189 Optimum Releasing 72, 90, 93, 102, 104–5 Ordinary Lies (TV series) 108, 157, 162, 166, 170 Original Films 58 Orion 39 Orphan (Collet-Serra) 143, 187, 188 Our Kind of Traitor (White) 136, 139, 162, 163, 167, 169, 211 Overman, Howard 110–11 Ovitz, Mike 75 Ozon, Francois 104, 152 Paddington (King) 1, 58, 94, 98–103, 120, 134, 170, 171, 180, 191, 192, 193 Paddington 2 (King) 58, 99, 102, 103, 170, 184, 210, 211 Paddington 3 184 Paddington Run (game) 103 Padilha, Jose 97, 128 Padovan, Adolfo 21 Palace Pictures 41 Panasonic 43 pan-European institutions 9 Paradis Films 149 Paramount Studios 20, 23, 31, 86, 139, 148 Paranoid (Netflix) 107, 195–6 Paranoid (TV series) 107–8 Paranormal Activity (Peli) 189 Paris (Klapisch) 158 Paris, Texas (Wenders) 33 The Paris Architect 132 “Paris for One” (Moyes) 183–4 Park, Nick 138, 157 Parkes, Walter 149 Parkinson, Tom 69

Index Parretti, Giancarlo 37 Passengers (Tyldum) 58 The Passion Play (Zecca) 20 Pastrone, Giovanni 21 Pathé, Charles 18–19, 30 Pathé-Freres 3, 5, 6, 8, 11, 18, 19–21, 22, 30, 36, 117, 210, 212, 213 Patrick Melrose (TV series) 110, 161 Peak TV 112, 212 Pegg, Simon 80 Peli, Oren 189 Pelle the Conqueror (August) 109 Pemberton, Steve 174 Penn, Sean 120, 139–40, 185, 187, 204, 205–7 Peppa Pig (TV series) 6 Perkins, Danny 105, 127 Perren, Alisa 3, 20–1, 39–40, 42, 97, 224 n.1 Persepolis (Satrapi) 157 Petro, P. 155 Philips 41, 42, 43, 118 Phillips, Todd 176 The Pianist (Polanski) 82–5 The Piano (Campion) 21 The Picture Company 132, 138 Pillars of the Earth (Follett) 135, 183 Pillars of the Earth (miniseries) 106, 116, 200 Pioneer Electronics 37, 52 piracy 9 The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (Lord and Newitt) 170 Pitt, Brad 198 The Place Beyond the Pines (Cianfrance) 128, 162 Planeta 82 Podium (Moix) 88 Polanski, Roman 82–4 PolyGram Filmed Entertainment (PFE) 18, 78, 121, 152, 209 demise of 43 important works 48 international distribution infrastructure 45–6 library 70–1 as precursor to Studiocanal 41–8 production at 48–9

255

television production and distribution 116–17 Working Title and 48, 75, 76 PolyGram Films 49 PolyGram Music 41–2 Pommer, Erich 23, 25, 26, 36 Ponsoldt, James 209 Ponti, Carlo 18 The Portrait of a Lady (TV series) 116, 136, 163 Pression, Gabriella 202 Pretty Woman (Marshall) 61, 65 Price, Adam 109, 158 Pride and Prejudice (Wright) 88 Prison Break (TV series) 58 The Private Life of Henry VIII (Korda) 22, 159 producers 5–6 The Producers (Brooks) 69 The Program (Frears) 95, 98, 156, 162, 164, 167, 168–9, 211 Propaganda Films 41, 48 Pulp Fiction (Tarantino) 21 Pumpkinhead (Winston) 69 Puttnam, David 4, 7, 8, 20, 35, 44, 71, 91 The Quatermass Experiment (TV series) 108, 136 The Queen (Frears) 5 Queen Elizabeth (Desfontaines and Mercanton) 20, 21, 22 Queer as Folk (TV series) 107, 157, 166 The Rabbi’s Cat (Sfar) 115 Radcliffe, Sarah 76 Radford, Michael 39 Radioactive 157, 164 Rahim, Tahar 162 Raimi, Sam 69 Raising Victor Vargas (Sollett) 81 Rambo (Kotcheff ) 52 Rambo series 37, 55 Rank, J. Arthur 28 Rank Organization 10, 18, 28–31, 45 Rash, Ron 176–7 Raw (Ducournau) 210 Raw Deal (Irvin) 68

256

Index

Ray Donovan (TV series) 6 RCA/NBC 43 RCS Video 52 readaptations. See remakes/readaptations Red Heat (Hill) 52 Red Productions 1, 107–8, 116, 118, 135–6, 157, 162, 166, 173–4, 175, 183, 189, 195 The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger) 29 Redvall, Eva Novrup 109 Reed, Carol 105 Reeves, Matt 143 Refugees (TV series) 111 Regency Enterprises 51, 53, 61–6 Reid, Anne 162 remakes/readaptations 133–40 popular literature 181–6 Renoir, Jean 70 The Replacements (Deutch) 76 Resident Evil franchise 137 Retribution 182, 188 The Return of Martin Guerre. See Le retour de Martin Guerre (Vigne) Reuther, Steven 64 The Revenant (Iñárritu) 62 Richardson, Tony 31, 70 Rides Upon the Storm (TV series) 109, 158 Rizzoli 37 Roberts, Julia 78 Roberts, Nora 135 Robinson Crusoe/The Wild Life (Kesteloot) 135, 192, 195 Robocop (Padilha) 97, 105, 106, 128, 148, 185, 187, 189, 194, 198 Roe, Annabelle Honess 79 Roeg, Nicholas 70 romantic comedies 190–1 Rome, Open City (Rossellini) 31, 39 Rona, Andrew 105, 108, 149, 185, 188, 207 Rooker, Michael 55 Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski) 83 Rosenfeldt, Hans 109 Rossi, Lara 203 A Royal Affair (Arcel) 158 Russell, David O. 176 Russell, Kurt 59

Russian Ark (Sokurov) 84 Ruzowitzky, Stefan 94, 158 Safe (TV series) 108, 157, 183, 195 Salle, Jérôme 104 Salmanpour, Chris 132 Saltzman, Harry 31 Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Frears) 76 Sammy’s Adventures 134–5, 180, 192 SAM Productions 109, 115, 157, 158, 212 Samuel Goldwyn Company 45 Sanchez, Eduardo 189 Sarde, Alain 81, 87 Scandinavia 109 scattergun approach 69 Schindler’s List (Spielberg) 144 Schoenaerts, Matthias 166, 167 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 38 Scorsese, Martin 61, 88 Scott, A. O. 84 Scott, Tony 62 Scott and Bailey (TV series) 162, 166, 170 screen industries 3–7 screenwriting training program 66 Scriba & Deyhle 62 Seagal, Steven 62 Seagram’s 42, 43, 45, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 85, 118 Second World War 21 The Secret Garden (Munden) 159 Séction Zero (TV series) 117 See Saw Films 7 Sefton, Dan 157 Senator Films 209 Serena (Bier) 94, 95, 128, 158, 162, 165, 168, 169, 176–9, 199 Serial (Bad) Weddings (Chauveron) 5, 36 Serpico (Lumet) 37 Sex, Lies and Handwriting 203 Sex and Lucia (Medem) 81 Sex and the City (TV series) 112 Seyfried, Amanda 155 Sfar, Joann 108, 115 Shackleton, Richard 160 Shakespeare in Love (Madden) 67

Index The Shallows (Collet-Serra) 143 Shamayalan, M. Night 76 Sharp, Lesley 162 Sharrock, Thea 184 Shaun of the Dead (Wright) 77 Shaun the Sheep Movie (Starzak and Burton) 95, 96–7, 98, 120, 157, 169, 170–3, 176, 180, 210 Sherfig, Lone 209 Sherlock (TV series) 6, 110 Shindler, Nicola 107, 108, 136, 183 The Shining (Kubrick) 100 showrunners 156–9 Showtime 107 Shut In (Blackburn) 209 Sichler, Frederic 87–8, 89, 90, 94, 120, 152 The Siege 164 Siemens 42, 43 Sightseers (Wheatley) 158 The Silence of the Lambs (Demme) 65 Silver, Joel 94, 97, 105, 139–40, 143, 147, 149, 187, 188, 204–7 Silver Linings Playbook (Russell) 176 Singer, Bryan 41 Sitges Film Festival 89 The Sixth Sense (Shamayalan) 76 Six Years (Coben) 108 Skarsgård, Stellan 162 Sky 117 Sky Atlantic 107 Sky Vision 117 Slumdog Millionaire (Boyle) 5, 153 Smiley, Michael 190 Smiley’s People (TV series) 110, 157 Smith, Mel 41, 48, 76 Smith, Sarah 171 Sokurov, Alexander 84 Sollett, Peter 81 Sommersby (Amiel) 62, 63–6 Sonnenfeld, Barry 209 The Son of Bigfoot 135, 185 The Son’s Room (Moretti) 81 Sony Pictures Classics 35, 39, 66 The Sopranos (TV series) 112 Sorrentino, Paolo 7, 210 Spacey, Kevin 112 “Spaghetti Westerns” 31

257

SparkTV 110 Spiderman 61, 70 Spielberg, Steven 10, 144 Spotless (TV series) 107, 114, 117, 135 Sproxton, David 171–2 Spyglass Entertainment 75, 80, 88, 197 Stallone, Sylvester 38, 55–6, 57 Stargate (Emmerich) 52, 53, 58–61, 70, 99, 103 Stargate Command (VOD service) 60 Stargate SG-1 (TV series) 60, 61 Starzak, Richard 95, 157, 170–3 Stassen, Ben 97, 192 Sthers, Amanda 158 Stone, Oliver 52, 62, 63 The Straight Story (Lynch) 81 The Stranger (Coben) 136 Strike Entertainment 148, 149 Strong, Mark 138, 141 Studio Babelsberg 82–3, 149 Studiocanal 1–2. See also case study auteur production 80–2 Bolloré regime at 118–21 Carolco and 51–8 collaboration with Hollywood 147–9 conservative content strategy 133–40 distribution network 4–5 European markets 9 as European studio 11 film production 105–6 financing practices 125–32 genre works (see genre works) Hollywood collaboration 147–9 international production 88–9 library acquisitions 67–71 London-based partnerships 66–7 middlebrow works (see middlebrow cinema) Regency Enterprises and 61–3 remakes/readaptations 133–40 television subsidiaries 6 tier 2 filmmaking 97–8 Working Title Films 76–7 Sugar Rush (TV series) 110 Sunny March TV 110, 161 Sutherland, Donald 184–5, 203 Sveistrup, Søren 109, 158

258 Svensk Filmindustri (SF Studios) 106, 109–10 Sweet, Jonny 108 Swimming Pool (Ozon) 104 Swinton, Tilda 162, 166, 167 Szpilman, Wladyislaw 82 Taken (Morel) 1, 38, 56, 114, 143, 144, 185, 187, 205, 206 Taken (TV series) 6 Taken 3 (Mégaton) 1 Take Two (TV series) 107, 116, 186, 201, 203–4 Tandem Communications 106, 116, 199–204 Tarantino, Quentin 21 Taxi (TV series) 6 The Teach (TV series) 117 The Team (TV series) 201 The Telegraph 173 Téléma 66–7 Televisa 111 television drama/series 1, 2. See also specific TV series acquiring and building producers 106–11 convergences of film and 114–16 deficit financing 112–13, 115 English language 212 golden age of 112–14 linguistic and cultural diversity 212 production and distribution 116–18 television producers 106–11 Television without Borders 150, 224 n.4 Tempest, Roy 164 Temple, Julien 69 Ten (Kiarostami) 84 Terminator 2 (Cameron) 37, 52, 54, 57, 104 Terra Mater 106 TF1 5 Their Finest (Sherfig) 209 The Theory of Everything (Marsh) 164 Theron, Charlize 197 Thin Skinned Animal 157 The Third Man (Reed) 105

Index Third Watch (TV series) 201 Thompson, Emma 101 Thompson, Kristin 7, 8, 18, 20, 22, 27 Thorne, Jack 115 Three Fugitives (Veber) 64 Three Men and a Baby (Nimoy) 64 Three Miles North of Molkom (Cannan and McFarlane) 190 Thunder and the House of Magic (Degruson and Stassen) 97, 105 Timberlake, Justin 162 Time Warner 91 Timmer, Jan 43 Timoshkina, Alissa 2 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Alfredson) 94, 95, 139, 140–7, 148, 149–50, 153, 156, 159, 160–1, 163, 165–6, 167, 169, 180, 181, 182 Titanic: Blood and Steel (TV series) 199–200 Tobis 87 TOC Films 66, 67 Tofu (TV series) 6, 107 Tom Jones (Richardson) 31 Top of the Lake (TV series) 7 Tornatore, Giuseppe 39 Total Recall 61, 70, 116 The Tourist (Donnersmarck) 57, 94, 96, 104, 128, 148, 182, 197–9 Townsend, Nathan 77 The Toy (Donner) 64 Trainspotting (Boyle) 67 transnationalism 11–12 Transporter Refuelled (Delamarre) 4, 209 Trapero, Pablo 157 TriStar 53, 56, 75 Troisi, Massimo 39 True Detective (TV series) 112 Trust Me (TV series) 108 Tschick/Goodbye Berlin (Akin) 126 Tucker, Anand 80, 197 Turner, Janine 56 TV3 109 TWC 99, 224 n.3 Twelve Years a Slave (McQueen) 62 21 Jump Street (Lord and Miller) 58

Index Twin Peaks (TV series) 81 The Two Faces of January (Amini) 139, 155, 156, 163, 167, 169 Two Women (de Sica) 32 Tyldum, Morten 58, 129 UFA (Universum Film AG) 22–6 UFA-Aubert 26 UGC DA 70 Under Siege (Davis) 62, 63 United 93 (Greengrass) 88 United Artists (UA) 3, 21, 31, 139 Universal International Pictures 147–8 Universal Music Group 44, 121 Universal Studios 43 Universum Film AG. See UFA (Universum Film AG) Unknown (Collet-Serra) 94, 128, 139, 140–7, 149–50, 165, 181, 182, 186–7, 188, 193, 204 Urban-Eclipse 19 Urban Myths Films 110–11 USA Networks 73, 74, 86 The Usual Suspects (Singer) 41 Vadim, Roger 32 Vajna, Andrew 37, 51–2, 70 Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (Besson) 4, 24, 58, 209 Van Cauwelaert, Didier 181–2 Vangsness, Kirsten 202 Variety 66 Vasilieva, Katrina 141 Veber, Francis 64 Velvet (TV series) 111, 191 Velvet (Velvet Collection) (TV series) 111, 191 Verhoven, Paul 22, 37 vertical integration 5–6 The Viceroy’s House (Chadha) 210 Victor the Assassin (Wood) 183, 205 Vincendeau, G. 9 Vivendi Universal 12, 18, 44, 72–92 American production 75–6 integrated European studios and 90–2 pan-European distribution 75–6

259

rise and fall of 72–4 Studiocanal 86–8 turmoil of 85–6 USA Networks 73, 74, 86 Von Sternberg, Josef 25, 153–5 Von Trier, Lars 158 von Trier, Lars 40 Wainwright, Sally 157, 175 Walker, Nicola 162 Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit 157, 170, 171, 172 Wallander (TV series) 109, 110 A War (Lindholm) 129, 158 The War Magician 110, 161 Warner Bros. 61–2, 64, 75, 94, 98, 99, 147, 148, 184 Watkins, James 187, 193, 211 Wayne, Mike 7, 8, 9, 18, 34–5, 42, 45 We Are Your Friends (Joseph) 98, 139, 162, 165 Weinstein, Harvey 40, 99 Weinstein Company 99 Weintraub Group 70 Wenders, Wim 33 Wheatley, Ben 158 Wild at Heart (Lynch) 48 Wild Bunch 5, 6, 36 Wilkinson, Kenton 14, 131 Wimbledon (Loncraine) 80 Wincer, Simon 62 Winner, Michael 37 Winseck, Dwayne 46–7 Winston, Stan 69 Winterbottom, Michael 127 Winter’s Bone (Granik) 176 Wood, Tom 183, 205 Woodfall Films 31, 70 Working Title Films 31, 41, 42, 48, 67, 72, 75, 76–80, 82, 87, 88, 92, 94, 97–8, 99–100, 119, 128, 143, 144, 148, 149, 150, 156, 157, 190, 198, 211 A World Apart (Menges) 76 World without End (Follett) 183 Wright, Joe 88

260 writers 8–9 Wyatt, Justin

Index

185

Xerox 30 xXx 3: The Return of Xander Cage (Caruso) 57, 58 XXX franchise 57 Yardie (Elba) YoukuTodou

121 104

Young, Robert 28 Young Adam (Mackenzie) 81 The Young Pope (Sorrentino) 7 ZDFNeo 107, 109 Zecca, Ferdinand 20 Zellweger, Renée 78–9 Zeta-Jones, Catherine 197, 198 Zukor, Adolph 20, 222 n.1 Zulu (Endfield) 69