Aiming to supply China’s booming market with upscale European fare, Studiocanal has signed multi-year deals with two leading Chinese SVOD platforms, YoukuTudou and BesTV New Media.
The deal YoukuTudou covers SVOD right to over 50 Studiocanal films, including “About a Boy,” Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” and David Lynch’s “Mulholland Dr..” Meanwhile, the pact with BesTV New Media – which reaches 20 million subscribers — covers several dozen titles from Studiocanal’s library. The agreements also entail SVOD rights to diverse French-language movies, notably “Cloclo” (pictured above), the biopic of famed singer Claude Francois, and “8 Women,” Francois Ozon’s mystery/musical comedy with Catherine Deneuve.
Studiocanal’s rich and diversified library boasts more than 5,000 films, many of which are European and French classics.
Per Matthieu Zeller, EVP of international marketing, distribution and business development, these deals “will give Chinese audiences access to a film offering that is different from but complementary with the Chinese and American films that dominate the market.”
Added Zeller, “We hope that it will be just the first stage of closer collaboration with our Chinese friends.”
Mathieu Gondinet, SVP of international TV and library Distribution for Studiocanal, told Variety that “gaining access to (the company’s) library of European and French films gave (YoukuTudou and BesTV) an opportunity to be original, differentiate themselves from other Chinese platforms (…) as well as show Chinese authorities that they are willing to open up to non-U.S. companies.”
Indeed, besides Chinese content, digital platforms in China are heavily dominated by U.S. product and often feature the same studio movies,” noted Gondinet, adding that Studiocanal will collaborate with both platforms on the marketing of films.
Mingcheng Tao, CEO of BesTV New Media Co Ltd. said the pact with Studiocanal underscores BesTV’s efforts to not only cover the traditional US-English, Japanese and Korean markets, but also expand into Europe.
Over at YoukuTudou Inc., Allen Zhu, senior VP, said “This deal will undoubtedly strengthen (YoukuTudou’s) service offering.” The platform’s subscription service has seen a 379% year-on growth in revenue during this year’s second quarter, according to Zhu.
The YoukuTudou deal was negotiated by Gondinet and Angela Xiong, exec director of Movie Center for YoukuTudou Inc.; while the agreement with BesTV was negotiated by Gondinet and Lin SHI, VP of content cooperation and Peiyi Jiang, head of international acquisitions for BesTV.
The pics that will be available on these two services are at least 36 months old since most recent films are sold for all rights to traditional distributors.
Speaking of new releases, the exec explained that Studiocanal is not interested in signing an output deal with a Chinese distributor (as EuropaCorp did with Fundamental). “We produce a lot of different films, and so we prefer having the best partner for each film,” argued Gondinet.
The veritically-integrated French major runs distribution operations in Gaul, Germany, the U.K., New Zealand and Australia and has just signed an output deal with Svensk for Scandinavia.
