Mediawan Rights Banks On Agility, Premium Content to Step Up Global Ambitions
variety.comBen Croll Mediawan Rights, the distribution arm of the wider media group, manages scripted, unscripted, format and feature documentary sales, keying European content onto international airwaves.
And if initially heritage titles, foreign-language fare and time-tested perennials made up much of the catalogue, the group’s expanding footprint and well-capitalized partnerships promise a new yield of premium fare developed in-house and marked by global ambitions. “We’ve seen a radical shift,” says Mediawan Rights CEO Valérie Vleeschhouwer. “Our catalogue from six years ago has little in common with that of today.
We really wanted to move upmarket, to increase our own creative output in both fiction and documentary distribution to better respond to global demand. [In doing so] we’ve gone from being a local player to a truly international one.” As distribution titles like the Emmy-winning doc “Kubrick by Kubrick” and the Dutch thriller “The Golden Hour” travel far and wide – with the former selling to more than 25 territories and the latter ranking among Netflix’s most-watched series across the globe – Vleeschhouwer and her team now want to offer a greater range of English language drama developed and produced from within the Mediawan group.
To that end, Mediawan inked a €100 million co-development deal with equity partner Entourage Ventures in 2023, signing a multi-year pact to finance and shepherd scripted, animated and nonfiction series in order to gain ease and agility. “A partner like Entourage gives us speed and striking power for more ambitious projects,” says Vleeschhouwer. “While the deal itself requires us to be more of an investor, partner and co-producer than a pure distributor.
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