“With the new world order you are going to see much lower budgets,” Miramax TV boss Marc Helwig has predicted, as he forecast the market for first-look deals will “further contract.”
A recent Miramax show for Netflix UK cost somewhere between £5M ($6.1M) and £7M ($8 .6M), a far cry from the blank cheque days of past years, Helwig revealed.
“We see opportunity internationally at significantly lower budgets and in the U.S. I think we will see budgets contracting in the way that the landscape is contracting,” he told a MIA Market panel titled The Producer’s Role. “With the new world order you are going to see lower license fees and much lower budgets.”
Turning to first-look deals, Helwig said that after joining Miramax as Head of Worldwide Television in 2020 his team started looking at the situation with several of these arrangements owing to the shifting landscape.
“There are instances where there are existing relationships that have borne fruit but for us as a nimble, smaller company it’s about placing bets in a different way,” he said in Rome.
“I can’t speak for colleagues at other studios but would imagine we will go into a period of further contraction when it comes to [first-look deals],” he said. “For us, it’s about making individual choices about who we can align ourselves with and who has the right point of view.
Major deals at the likes of Netflix, Disney and Lionsgate were suspended towards the back-end of the writers strike and are yet to be reinstated. Miramax signed a first-look deal with Scream creator Kevin Williamson in 2018 and has in the more distant past struck big tie-ups with major filmmakers.
Speaking alongside Helwig, Anonymous Content Chief Creative Officer David Levine said companies “learn hard lessons about where you are in [these] relationships” during difficult times. “Internationally we really try to back strong producers and if we can supply producers with more that works then that is our victory,” he added.
Helwig predicted further across-the-board contraction in TV shows but said there was “certainly too much stuff” commissioned during the streaming arms race.
“There was a massive over-proliferation of content and it was not sustainable to be a part of,” he added. “This period of contraction is a little scary but is very necessary because we have to direct our focus elsewhere.”
He predicted a “side effect of the strikes” could be more foreign-language content finding distribution in North America, which could be a “great thing.”
“We are not in the remakes business”
Since Helwig joined the Bein and Paramount-owned outfit, he has been busy re-tooling old film IP for TV series, and shows based on Guy Ritchie’s The Gentleman and Johnny Depp-starrer Chocolat are in the works.
Delving deeper into his strategy, Helwig said “we are not in the remakes business but are in the business of looking for creative ideas inspired by IP.”
“Because the library is international-centric there is naturally a way that those films can be exploited in a global context,” he said. “There is lots of work to be done on adaptations based on UK movies, but we are doing similar things across Europe.”
During a wide-ranging panel, Helwig also slammed AI, saying that he “cannot possibly comprehend how it can be part of the [creative] process.”
“I refuse to accept it is something we are going to have to grapple with,” he added.
“We believe in stories and human beings. I don’t know how you hand that over to AI as a matter of discourse.”
MIA Market is running all this week in Rome, with talks from the likes of Paramount’s Nicole Clemens and Skybound’s Marge Dean.
