“Everything is very challenging right now. We have had 10 years which were wonderful in France and all over Europe.” That is how Gaumont Television president and producer Isabelle Degeorges described the state of the TV sector after the end of Peak TV during a keynote appearance at the Conecta Fiction & Entertainment industry gathering in Cuenca, Spain.
“There was a period when anything was possible. All streamers wanted to come to France and wanted to commission in France,” she highlighted. But COVID and the end of peak TV mean that everyone must now operate under a new normal.
But Degeorges says it’s all about the right attitude to tackle challenges. “We just have to find that it’s normal,” she argued. “I mean, it is normal. We know that all over the world, it’s normal to fight, it’s normal to adapt, it’s normal to create new shows.”
With Netflix hit series Lupin recently getting renewed for season 4, Degeorges shared the state of production. “We are shooting right now, and it will arrive on screen next year,” she told the Conecta audience without sharing any insights into the storylines or other creative details.
Owning strong intellectual property has been a key focus for producers, and Gaumont isn’t any different in that regard in the age of global streamers. France’s rules requiring U.S. and global streamers to invest a minimum of 20 percent of their net French revenue in European works is key here, Degeorges emphasized. “If we don’t own the IP, we lose our identity,” she said. “If we don’t own the IP, my feeling is that everything belongs to the U.S., and at the end, it is their identity.”
Speaking of IP, the executive on Tuesday also touted such upcoming projects as In the Shadow of the Forest, a thriller series for Apple TV+ starring Benoît Magimel and Mélanie Laurent for Apple TV+, and the ninth season of hit procedural The Art of Crime for France Télévisions that Gaumont has sold to more than 60 countries.
Degeorges also used her Conecta keynote to argue in favor of the regulation of artificial intelligence, calling for rules that ensure that AI companies properly pay creators rather than use their works for free to train their models.
