French TV Sellers Pin Hopes On Paris Screenings In Absence Of MIPTV

EXCLUSIVE: French television program sellers are placing extra impetus on this week’s Paris screenings events with MIPTV no longer on their schedules.

Several sources in French distribution have told Deadline that the third French TV Screenings (now known as the Paris TV Screenings) could grow in the absence of MIPTV, France‘s second-largest television market until its demise last year.

They are taking place under the auspices of French film and TV export body Unifrance’s 27th Rendez-Vous in Paris. The annual event, which launched in the late 1990s with a focus on cinema, expanded its remit to TV following Unifrance’s merger with TV France International in 2021.

Major France-based sellers such as Mediawan, Newen Connect and France TV Distribution will join smaller boutiques such as Film & Picture, Studiofact Rights, Balanga and Terranoa in showcasing new shows at the Paris Pathé Parnasse cinema from Jan 14 to 16, and taking meetings at the Film & TV Content Market in the nearby Pullman Hotel which runs across the week.

Around 100 TV buyers are expected to be in the City of Light across the week, and hopes are high that the event can capitalize on recent events.

“This year, we won’t have MIPTV, which was essential to us even with the decreasing numbers,” said Marie-Laure Hébrand, founder and Executive Director of Film & Picture, which is screening four-part female serial killer drama The Black Widow. “At the Paris Screenings, all of the broadcasters will have their new budgets and are starting to acquire.”

The Black Widow, which launched on France 2 last year and is from Episode Productions, stars Odile Vuillemin as a serial killer based on a real-life case in France in which a woman murdered three of her former husbands before being apprehended attempting to kill the fourth. “The show did extremely well in France, with around four million viewers each episode, and kept that number stable,” said Hébrand. “The people who came, stayed.”

We understand Film & Picture is heading into the event with pre-sales secured with Antena 3 in Spain and Rai in Italy, with a buyer in the U.S. looking likely, along with others in Central and Eastern Europe and Portugal.

Hébrand will travel to Series Mania in the northern French city of Lille in March, but is undecided on whether she will make the trip to MIP London, the UK event that is ostensibly replacing MIPTV and runs concurrently with the London TV Screenings. “Fiction buyers will attend Series Mania and they will increase with disappearance of MIPTV,” she said.

She does not know how many acquisitions executives will attend MIPTV, which is being held at the Savoy Hotel and adjoining IET London conference center, assuming most in town will stick to the screenings format that has developed to such a degree over recent years. It’s a question we’ve heard numerous times over recent months. No distributor wants to invest their money in the wrong place in the tricky market of 2025.

For its part, MIP London organizer RX France told Deadline last month that 350 buyers had signed up, and that there is an expectation of up to 2,000 delegates attending in total.

Unifrance’s Executive Director Daniela Elstner said it is impossible to predict how MIP London will impact the buyers’ market, but believes the Paris TV Screenings can profit from the developing situation, especially with the popular two-day MIPDoc event in Cannes unlikely to be of the same scale in London. “Especially for factual distributors, there is something missing,” she added. “Hopefully, we can start something with our event.”

Towards the end of 2024, Elstner notes, buyers and sellers suddenly appeared more aware that MIPTV would not be happening and nervousness set in, with a staple of their schedules gone. “No one knows what MIP London is going to look like, so you can either be anxious or you can reshape and treat it as an opportunity,” she adds. “I’m more for the second. There is a shift and you have to adapt.”

Adapting is exactly what Unifrance did last year when it moved its other main TV event, which also operates under the Rendez-Vous brand, to Le Havre, Normandy. Next up, in a TV sense, is building out the Paris screenings and a bold approach is being taken. In previous years, the film and TV promotion body had wondered if an event in January was wrong for buyers, but the recent changes have altered thinking.

“Many broadcasters and streamers would close their budgets at the end of one year and then start new ones and didn’t want to spend too much, so we always wondered if the date was a little too early in the year,” said Elstner. “But with the shifts we’ve seen, we now think, on the contrary, it might start something for the new year.”

Tough year ahead as sellers prep wares

Whether the new-look international schedule changes business or not, distributors in France are bracing for another difficult year. Figures released at Rendez-Vous in September showed international sales of French TV shows were €203M ($208M) in 2023, down 5.3% on 2022 as buyers withheld spend.

Cloë Pinot, International Sales Manager at another boutique distributor, Balanga, acknowledged 2024 had been “tough for everyone.” It actually represented a good year for Paris-based Balanga despite the general “low volume of acquisitions, low prices and delays in responses,” but highlighted the need for boutiques to be “very precise about the projects we take on,” she added.

Balanga, which celebrated a decade in business last year, has navigated through by focusing primarily on docs, and dipping into scripted when opportunities arise. One such instance will see it pitching Deadline (no, not us), a comedy-drama about a young drug addict played by singer-actor Soko, who seeks to pay off her debt by working in a palliative care home and stealing its drugs, only for a patient to rumble her and demand she helps grant their last wish or be exposed.

“It has a very comedic, sarcastic tone and is very bittersweet,” said Pinot. “The lead role is very well written, as she goes from only seeing the job as a way to pay back her dealer to developing a friendship with the patient. It is her redemption path. The subject and tone is unique and sets the series apart, as no one else is talking about death in this way.”

Balanga and Deadline producer Mesdames Production have adapted what was originally a six-part half-hour series into three commercial hours that will better serve international broadcast slots, and have discussed turning it into a telemovie if desired. Ratings for the show on OCS in France were good, Pinot said, while noting that Cesar-nominated actress Soko, who lives between L.A. and Paris, has written original material for the series. It’s a good example of the varied, diverse nature of the shows that around 50 TV distributors will be presenting to buyers across the week in Paris at Rendez-Vous.

That need for difference is obvious, as even France’s larger distributors have been challenged in the face of a readjusting international market. Randall Broman, Head of International Sales — Scripted Content at The Count of Montecristo seller Mediawan Rights said that last year “presented challenges for our entire industry,” but that his company “successfully navigated this landscape through a high-quality lineup that enables us to respond rapidly to ever-evolving market demands.”

Mediawan Rights will be launching Prime Video France drama Dear You, which Broman said “comes to market at a time when audiences are looking for uplifting and entertaining series.” The 15-part series — from Elephant Story and made by Aurélie Belko, Julie-Albertine Simonney and Sébastien Le Délézir — follows a new guest relations manager (Carla Poquin) at the Hotel Folie, where she has to juggle extravagant customer requests and meets a sexy billionaire hotel guest launching a unique dating app.

After Elise Castel and Charlotte Denaud from Elephant Story purchased rights to Emily Blaine’s decade-old novel of the same name, they quickly sold the project to Amazon. “There was a big adaptation challenge for this series,” said Denuad. “First, because the story in the novel takes place in New York, and we had to adapt it to Paris, and secondly, because Emily wrote this novel more than 10 years ago, and since then society has evolved, as have relationships between men and women. We really wanted to anchor this series in today’s Paris and paint a current and modern portrait of the young generation.”

Denaud added that the high-end look of the drama meant Prime Video’s local funding was not enough to cover the budget, and that clever production techniques and additional finance were needed. “As we believe this series has real international potential — romantic comedy is a genre that exports well and Paris remains the Capital of Love — we quickly approached Mediawan Rights, a distributor we know well,” said Denaud. “They reacted enthusiastically as soon as they read the scripts and allowed us to complete the budget.”

Of course, France has the added funding layer of the CNC, which operates independently of government and is able to get a diverse array of genres into production, alongside strong public and commercial broadcasters and global streamers such as Prime Video that have bought into the idea of the local market. “That is exactly how you can make these surprising series,” she added.

For Nadia Chevallard, SVP of Distribution at Newen Connect, which is in town launching relationship drama A Common Interest, the French TV Screenings play an important role in the calendar as the first market of the year, and “the right place and time to introduce brand new French drama series to the international marketplace.”

A Common Interest stars Cécile Bois (Drops of God, Candice Renoir), Antonia Desplat (Shantaram, Three Days of the Wing of Madness) and Thierry Neuvic and follows an unconventional threesome, of sorts. It follows a 50-year-old, working-class woman, Rita, whose husband, Olivier, has been having an affair with a 35-year-old, Olympe, who has lived the life of privilege. Somehow Rita ends up as Olympe’s assistant and they form an odd couple bond, just as Olivier tries to win Rita back.

Marie Dupuy d’Angeac, a producer at A Common Interest maker Barjac, also part of Newen Connect’s parent Newen Studios, called the series “very French — a universal story, a threesome in love, set in a sexy luxury arena, [fashion store] Hermes in Paris,” adding, “We have a terrific female duo that people can recognize, fascinating and terribly endearing.”

Another Barjac producer, Lolita Franchet, said the show was atypical for French linear TV, making it hard to finance. “We’re more used to broadcasting crime or mystery series — shows where the people know perfectly well what they’re going to watch,” she added. “Here, the script generates a lot of questions: What will the show look like precisely? It is comedy? Is it a drama? Is it about love? Is it an office drama? We often have to explain the show’s intent and our vision, and we need to reassure people that it’s a character-driven series but with high dramatic stakes.”

Ultimately, this year’s Paris TV Screenings will reflect its members’ desire to be closer to international buyers and start business earlier, said Unifrance’s Elstner. “Psychologically, there is a switch from one year to the next, and we hope the Paris Screenings offer something for buyers and distributors that starts a new push ahead of what is comes after,” she added.

For Mediawan’s Broman, “The strength of French production lies not only in its consistently improving quality over the years but also in its diversity. French production companies have evolved significantly, now creating content with a global mindset. This transformation has allowed them to adapt to the ever-changing international market and position them as a key player in the global television and film industry.”

Exactly how global they’ve become will become clear next week.