“Those About to Die,” AGC Television’s upcoming gladiator series from Roland Emmerich, stars Anthony Hopkins and boasts a cast drawn from across Europe and the Middle East. It’s also financially innovative.
Rather than rely on a single, deep-pocketed streamer to write the check for the pricey series, budgeted at $145 million for the first season, AGC adopted a split rights structure: U.S. rights are licensed to Peacock, European rights to HEP, the Herbert Kloiber Sr./Constantin joint venture, and AGC International distributing in the rest of the world.
AGC chairman and CEO Stuart Ford takes pride in proving the naysayers wrong with financing for the project set in ancient Rome and based on Daniel P. Mannix’s book of the same name.
“We’ve assembled the show’s financing through a complex and innovative web of rights deals, banking arrangements and soft money,” Ford says. “We also assembled the writers’ room and played our part in the creation of all 10 scripts and the show’s casting. So many times, we were told that a show of this scale couldn’t be made without a single source streaming platform writing the check. But here we are in our third month of production with AGC and its production partners at Centropolis, Street Entertainment and Hollywood Gang owning the show, owning the backend, exerting significant creative autonomy and controlling worldwide distribution.
“It’s taken a mountain of dealmaking sophistication, determination and a willingness to create a new business model for us to eventually deliver on the initial promise to our partners,” he says. “It embodies who we are.”
AGC’s commitment to the small screen has been evident from the start: former NBC, Viacom Intl. and Univision exec Lourdes Diaz came onboard in 2018 to oversee its TV ops. Diaz is now chief creative officer, with oversight of scripted TV business, while also sitting on the board of its unscripted TV subsidiary AGC Unwritten. She also helps Ford run the film operation.
“We basically run film, scripted TV and unscripted/factual as three separate production hubs that are responsible for their own P&L but with a backbone of shared internal support,” says Ford.
“One of the things that attracted me to AGC was Stuart’s ‘billion dollar gut’ and the innovative ways he financed independent films and gave filmmakers a true sense of ownership in the process,” says Diaz. “I wanted to do the same in television, and Stuart was exactly the maverick to blow up television paradigm. We had a vision for the sort of project needed to do that and Roland Emmerich’s ‘Those About to Die’ was exactly that television series. When [executives producers] Roland [Emmerich], Gianni [Nunnari], Harald [Kloser] and Bob [Rodat] first told us about it, we knew it had the scope and scale to merit a big production and when they through the first pages it was confirmed it had the heart, ambition and hero’s journey of Roland’s epic films.”
AGC is in pre-production on Season 2 of crime drama “Troppo,” starring Thomas Jane, which AGC Television co-finances with the Australian Broadcasting Corp. It recently completed a first season of espionage drama “Gray” with Patricia Clarkson and Lydia West, which the studio co-financed with Lionsgate Television. Last year, it completed a three-season arc on sci-fi series “War of the Worlds,” in partnership with Studio Canal, completed acclaimed Gabriel Garcia Marquez adaptation “News of a Kidnapping” for Amazon and debuted a first season of self-financed heist drama “Leopard Skin” starring Carla Gugino on Peacock.
While AGC has had success with nonfiction features such as Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 11/9,” co-financed three features with CNN Films including Jackie Collins biography “Ladyboss” and “John Lewis: Good Trouble” as well as executive producing Golden globe nominated documentary “Ask Dr Ruth,” it was the Netflix global smash “The Tinder Swindler” — developed with Jeff Gaspin’s Gaspin Media — that really showed the huge potential of unscripted and nonfiction.
“We executed a second round of internal funding last year to permit launching our unscripted subsidiary Unwritten, a family/YA division and also for further content financing,” notes Ford.
Last July, AGC launched AGC Unwritten with former “America’s Got Talent” producer and Magical Elves senior exec Joel Zimmer as president. Zimmer and a team of five execs have been busy developing a slate of docuseries, game shows, dating shows, reality series and documentaries, many with an eye on exploitation as global formats.
“We’re focused on two tracks of development, affordable volume-based programming for our domestic network partners, and then large-scale unique global formats that can leverage AGC’s worldwide film and television footprint, our IP library and A-list talent relationships,” says Zimmer.
Unwritten’s slate includes a series in development at Peacock, a limited documentary series at Amazon Prime Video and documentary feature “Transition,” which will make its world premiere at Tribeca. It’s also serving as executive producer on documentary biopic “Nobu,” directed by Matt Tyrnauer, now in pre-production.
“In the early years it was our film production and film sales operations that fueled the studio’s engine,” says Ford, “but in 2024 scripted television revenues will outstrip film, and we’re also expecting the Unwritten pipeline of unscripted and factual content with its solid margins to meaningfully boost the overall bottom line.”