French Giant Pathe Aims to Go Big in Theaters and With Streamers

variety.com:

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentPathé may be one of France’s oldest film groups, but it is young at heart. The only French film company that is still fully involved in exhibition, production, distribution and sales, Pathé has been confronting the challenges wrought by the pandemic and the arrival of streamers with bold steps and ambitious new projects.

During the Cannes Film Festival, the company will receive Variety’s Intl. Achievement in Film Award.In the past two years, the family-owned film group, which is led by the visionary businessman Jérôme Seydoux, saw its “CODA” win three Oscars for family drama; greenlit the country’s biggest-budgeted movies in recent history, “Asterix and Obelix: The Middle Kingdom” ($75 million) and the two-part adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ masterpiece, “The Three Musketeers — D’Artagnan” and “The Three Musketeers — Milady” ($75 million); it ventured into TV series; and forged bonds with streaming services, including Netflix and Apple TV+. “When theaters were shut down, we didn’t scale back on projects.

We have continued making movies for cinemas and that requires a certain level of quality, and the promise of delivering a spectacle,” says Ardavan Safaee, who joined Pathé Films in 2015, and was appointed chairman of Pathé Films in September 2019.Indeed, Pathé has produced some of France’s most ambitious films in recent years, such as Antonin Baudry’s submarine thriller “The Wolf’s Call,” Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “Notre-Dame on Fire” as well as Martin Bourboulon’s period film “Eiffel,” about the mastermind behind the famous Paris landmark, Gustave Eiffel.Safaee says Pathé’s DNA has always been about producing top-notch movies, such as Patrice Chéreau’s 1994 historical film “La Reine.