Streamers Scale Back on epic TV as European TV Faces Cost Crunch

International series do not lack scale and ambition.

The lineup of this year’s Series Mania, the TV festival and industry meet that runs through March 28 in Lille, France, includes historic epics like Joe Wright’s rise-to-fascism biography Mussolini: Son of The Century, real-life action thriller Kabul, which traces the fall of Afghan capital to the Taliban in 2021, and Liongate’s spy drama The German, from the creators of Fauda and Tehran, about Holocaust survivors recruited to track down Nazi war criminals.

Add to that the screenings at the festival’s upfront event, held Monday, March 24, where top-tier buyers get a sneak peek at upcoming international series. The 10 featured upfront shows include German fantasy epic War of the Kingdoms, Korean sci-fi series S Line and Swiss thriller The Deal starring The Broken Circle Breakdown star Veerle Baetens as a diplomat tasked with brokering last-chance nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.

Despite that impressive output, all is not well on the international series front. Shifts in the buying habits of the global streamers, coupled with a rise in production costs and a drop in acquisition budgets among traditional networks, have put the squeeze on big-budget series.

“Spend is down and it’s staying down,” says Guy Bisson of TV market research group Ampere Analysis, which has reported a 25 percent spending drop in new global scripted series orders from all-time highs seen back in 20222. “We are not going back to the peaks of peak TV. And there’s been a strategic shift from the streamers, which are spending more of their budget on sports rights, more on unscripted TV and more on traditional genres like crime shows, leaving less for high-end premium series.”

Bisson calls the move the “broadcast-ification of streaming,” whereby the popular platforms, primarily Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+, having reached high penetration rates in many territories, with ad-supported tiers to their subscription services, are starting to behave like more traditional free-to-air networks.

“We’ve seen a big upswing in crime drama, which we’ve always thought of as the bread and butter of network TV,2 he says, “but in Western Europe last year, nearly half of all streaming scripted commissions were crime shows.”

“We are living through a transformation of the market,” notes Frederic Balmary, chief business officer at indie production giant Banijay, whose French culinary-themed drama Carême, about the world’s first celebrity chef (played by Summer of ’85 star Benjamin Voisin) opened the festival on Friday. “It’s more and more difficult to finance the big shows.”

The streamers haven’t abandoned epic TV entirely. Carême, which bows on AppleTV+ on April 30, is lush in period detail and on-screen production values. Netflix spared no expense for the new season of its Brit hit Bridgeton or Keira Knightley/Ben Whishaw spy thriller Black Doves.

“No one is ditching high-end drama completely, but it’s obviously less important,” says Bisson. “The spend levels, not just from the streamers, but globally, is broadly flat. And the cost of production is going up, so the volume is down. You are getting fewer shows for the same money.”

“The big streamers, if they really want a show, are willing to spend whatever it takes to get it,” says Sabine de Mardt, head of Gaumont productions in Germany, which has made such series as Interpreter of Silence and for Disney+/Hulu, Barbarians for Netflix and the upcoming dramedy Parallel Me for Paramount+. “But getting to that yes is taking a lot longer.”

The U.K., which has seen a streaming-fueled boom in high-end TV, leading to a sharp rise in production costs, is facing a different challenge. Big-budget shows are being priced out of the range of traditional broadcasters, including the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4, who still account for the vast majority of original series produced in Britain.

“Today, the gap between available funding for programming and current budgets is simply too high,” said Black Doves producer Jane Featherstone in a speech at the Broadcasting Press Guild Awards in London on March 20. “We’re at risk of losing the very stories that define us.”

Rising production costs are meeting falling international sales, particularly for more challenging material. It’s notable that recent epic series including Fremantle‘s Mussolini: Son of The Century and War of the Kingdoms, Sony Pictures Television’s Australian WW2 drama The Narrow Road to the Deep North starring Jacob Elordi and Thomas Vinterberg’s climate change disaster tale Families Like Ours, which are Australian WW2 drama The Narrow Road to the Deep North starring Jacob Elordi, the German fantasy epic War of the Kingdoms, and Thomas Vinterberg’s climate change disaster tale Families Like Ours, which StudioCanal is selling worldwide, have still looking for a U.S. buyer.

“On the financing side, the big challenge for these shows is to get the U.S. pre-sale,” says Balmary. “But without pre-selling the U.S. this kind of big show is just not sustainable.”

Big U.S. pre-sales still happen. Banijay secured a second season for its lush period drama Marie Antoinette, a co-production between France’s Canal+ and the BBC, thanks to a U.S. pre-sale to PBS. Showtime pre-bought Gomorrah: The Origin, from Beta Film, helping secure a greenlight for the prequel series to the long-running Napleses mafia drama from European producers Sky Studios and ITV-owned Cattleya.

But the gap between what these international epics cost, and how much money commissioners are willing to pay for them, is only growing. Even the streamers are becoming more cost-conscious, paying local rates for local content, often hiving off rights for select territories instead of doing the worldwide deals that were once the norm. Amazon will premiere The Narrow Road to the Deep North in Australia, New Zealand and Canada on April 18, but Sony has sold on rights to a collection of broadcasters, public and commercial, in most of the rest of the world, including to the BBC in Britain, Sky and Max in Europe, and NBCUniveral in Latin America.

“There are still shows that Netflix, Amazon or Disney want worldwide rights for but for a lot of them now, they just want one country, or a handful,” says Balmary, “which is good news for us, because we can retain IP, and we love to retain IP, but the bad news means the financing gap gets bigger, and we have to find new ways to close it.”

In this new cash-strapped era, co-production, whereby networks in different countries, or different platforms in the same territory, pool resources to finance a show and split up the rights, has become a go-to financing model. Co-pro partnerships are getting bigger and more complicated — Kabul, which Mediawan Rights/Entourage Media is selling worldwide, was made by New8, a drama collaboration by 8 public broadcasters from across Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands — and often bridge the public/commercial and broadcast/streamer divide. Swiss public broadcaster SRF and commercial streamer RTL+ are teaming up for a reboot of Alpine family classic Heidi, which Gaumont is producing. Financing for Beta Film’s sci-fi disaster series The Swarm (2023) came together through a combination of European public broadcasters (ZDF, France Télévisions, Italy’s RAI) and commercial streamers, including Viaplay Group in Scandinavia and Hulu Japan. It then pre-sold to CW for the U.S.

“You need more partners and often different partners than before [to make these shows],” says Oliver Bachert, chief distribution officer at Beta Film. “Which means you have to start talking with partners a lot earlier and come up with more creative models.”

Increasingly, those models involve complex, and creative, windowing: Carving out exclusive licensing periods for local broadcasters and streamers, allowing multiple licensing deals for a show in a single territory. Beta’s Berlin hospital drama Krank (aka Berlin ER), has exclusive first-window rights on AppleTV+ worldwide, but its second-window release in Germany is on public broadcaster ZDFNeo. Beta’s royal romancer Maxima has a similar setup, going out first on RTL+ before shifting to ZDFNeo in its second window.

“The difference in the market now is that everyone, including the streamers, are much more open to licensing content in short windows, to have a second or a third window for that content and giving it a second life,” says Bisson. “If you look back a few years, the majority of the 10 most popular dramas on Netflix were Netflix originals. Now the majority, or a large portion, are licensed shows. So Netflix is clearly looking to fill the holes by licensing quality drama that’s had a good run somewhere else.”