Marking a new phase of expansion, Barcelona-based Scenic Rights, the biggest literary rights broker for Spanish-language film and TV series, is set to enter Central and Eastern Europe opening offices in Prague in January 2022.
Further new international offices will be announced shortly, Scenic Rights has announced.
Scenic Rights CEE marks a collaboration with the creative heads of Dramedy Productions, an independent Prague-based film-TV production house that created retro family drama “Wonderful Times” (“Vyprávěj”), a Golden Nymph winner at the Monte Carlo TV Festival. Dramedy also co-produced Italian crime drama “Maltese” with Palomar and ZDF Enterprises, which was written by “Gomorrah” scribes Leonardo Fasoli and Maddalena Ravagli.
Dramedy will manage operations in Central and Eastern Europe, led by its CEO, seasoned showrunner-producer Filip Bobiňski. Martin Porges and Teresa Lacinová, Dramedy International head of production, will also join the team.
Scenic Rights’ CEE branch reflects a broader market perception that Central and Eastern Europe represent one of the most exciting growth regions in the continent, still far from full market potential.
Through strategic agreements with publishing houses such as Penguin Random House, Planeta, Unidad Editorial, Anagrama and Hispanic literary agencies Kerrigan, Casanovas & Lynch, Carmen Balcells, Schavelzon-Graham and The Colchie Agency, under CEO Sydney Borjas and COO Ignacio Díaz (pictured) Scenic Rights has access to over 20,000 literary works for film, TV and digital makeovers.
In recent years, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Baltic Staes have been “establishing themselves as audiovisual production hubs, attracting a growing number of international studios, SVOD platforms and operators that demand increasingly more stories and high-value IPs for the production of TV and films,” Scenic Rights argued.
So Scenic Rights will look to replicate its business over the last 20 years both promoting its titles for literary adaptation in Central and Eastern Europe and acquiring stories and literary works from the region which have large international potential, it added.
Scenic Rights’ latest move comes as both movie and drama series producers, platforms and established players are increasingly turning to IP-based titles in order to cut through the extraordinary competition for audience attention.
As of first quarter 2021, one in four of all new commissions of scripted TV shows globally was an adaption (book, comic, manga, movie, blog etc.), according to Guy Bisson at Ampere Analysis.
With offices already set up in Los Angeles and Madrid, Scenic Rights has come to manage the rights of over 140 projects in different stages of development and production in over a dozen countries.
It was involved in Amazon and A&E’s “Hernan,” produced by Dopamina Studios; Amazon’s El Cid”; Atresmedia’s “The Cook of Castamar” and “The Vineyard,” produced by Buendía Estudios for Amazon Prime Video; and TVE’s “Promesas de arena” and Netflix’s “Magic for Humans: Mago Pop” and pioneering international animation show “The Idhun Chronicles.”
Shows Scenic Rights has in development take in Gato Grande’s “La isla de la Pasión,” Fremantle’s “El Director,” Buendía Estudios’ “Infierno en el Paraíso,” Atresplayer’s “Zorras,” Secuoya Studios’ “La mala leche” and “The School of the Americas,” Tondero’s “El túnel,” Vértice 360’s “Sin retorno,” and “Toda la sangre,” to be released on StarzPlay and Pantaya and produced by Spiral International and Fremantle.