eOne release The Girl on The Train in cinemas October 6.
Since its acquisition by eOne in 2011, Hopscotch-eOne ANZ has become a global player. IF speaks to three of the team – Jude Troy, eOne ANZ’s EVP, TV Development and Acquisitions, Lucy Hill, eOne ANZ’s Head of Acquisitions and Maeva Gatineau, Hopscotch Features’ Senior Vice President of Production – about the restructure, the distribution game and the landscape in 2016.
What are your roles at eOne?
Hill: I head up acquisitions for eOne Australia and New Zealand, which means that I coordinate for our team, which includes Jude as well as Troy Lum, Sandie Don, Jason Hernandez and Kata [Mandic]. We look at which films we want to buy, primarily for theatrical but also for our home entertainment platforms, the landscape for which is changing massively.
Troy: I joined in 2004 as a small partner at Hopscotch. Troy brought me in, [with] Sandie and Frank Cox at the time, to build the home ent. division, so I was acquiring a lot of TV shows. Spooks, Life on Mars, The Inbetweeners. I ran that for ten years and then moved into TV development, mainly because eOne is such a powerhouse in terms of television distribution; we’ve got the Mark Gordon Company out of the US, we’re doing TV production in the UK and then [we’ve got] a massive distribution arm with the AMC-Sundance output deal. Which kind of feeds into our output deals on the film sales side. We’re in the very early stages of TV development and production working with Hopscotch Features, Goalpost, Robert Connolly and Aquarius Films, who have a first-look deal with for film and TV. And, brilliantly, we’ve also got a first-look deal with Hopscotch Features. So we’re working with Maeva, Andrew Mason, John Collee and Troy across the three or four TV projects we have in development for the international market.
Gatineau: I’m at Hopscotch Features. I’ve been here for a year and a half. I was with Miramax and the Weinsteins for many years. When Hopscotch sold the company to eOne, Hopscotch Features stayed independent but have a first-look deal with eOne Internationally and all our films in Australia and New Zealand are distributed by eOne. Troy is across both eOne and Hopscotch. I arrived off the back of The Water Diviner and now we have a brand new slate into development, and we’re also going into TV with Jude.
Hill: The three of us really are the three doors into the companies.
Troy: The other person that’s important in the acquisitions wheel is Sandie Don as head of distribution for AU/NZ. She was an original partner in Hopscotch with Troy. I would credit her with building the Hopscotch brand and the Hopscotch community from a marketing perspective. She’s an incredible marketer. We’ve moved from what we were with Hopscotch to releasing much bigger films, through the Summit output deal and the Amblin deal. So we have tent-pole titles such as The Girl on the Train, while we still buy and release smaller titles like Amy. You’re really tapping into very different marketing [muscles].
Hill: It was a natural progression anyway, that we were just going into bigger films, when the eOne sale happened. We were [already] growing from [just being] a boutique distributor.
Did the staff numbers expand after the sale?
Hill: Absolutely, but they were steadily climbing anyway. When I started there were roughly twelve people, and now we’ve got close to fifty. That’s over a ten-year span.
Troy: To be fair, if you compare the turnover we’re doing and the growth areas we have in television and film against the landscape, we still run pretty efficiently in terms of overhead. When eOne bought Hopscotch, they similarly bought like-minded entrepreneurial companies around the globe. People like Troy with strong identities and a strong brand. They overlaid some great infrastructure in terms of finance and legal. We’d be writing contracts on the back of a napkin back in the day – it’s much more rigorous now. And we now have more buying power in the marketplace, giving us that multi-territory clout.
Hill: We have the UK, Spain, Canada, the Benelux. Having those territories, we can buy up a chunk of the world. As the market changes, the amount of product available when we physically go to market is less and less, so if we have those territories behind us we can go in with a bit of force and it helps enormously.
Troy: And also producing our own IP in so many territories. The strength of Hopscotch Features and their acumen here, the Mark Gordon company in the U.S., plus what Xavier Marchand and the [eOne Features] team is producing out of the UK, [plus] the deal with Amblin…
Gatineau: Mark Gordon was in Cannes with Molly’s Game, the Aaron Sorkin feature with Jessica Chastain. Great presentation. That was one of the big projects that sold really well [at Cannes].
Hill: That’ll be one of the first projects we see down the Mark Gordon pipeline.
Troy: [In] TV, he’s got Designated Survivor with Kiefer Sutherland, which launched to great response at the LA upfronts. It’s high concept. He [Mark Gordon] speaks to that really commercial audience. And certainly having AMC on the TV side doing The Walking Dead, right down through to Peppa Pig on the eOne Family side, and Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom – our reach in television is very strong.
Are you seeing more volume in terms of scripts coming across your desks?
Hill: From a theatrical point of view, not really. Even though we were such a small operation in comparison to now, the acquisitions team hasn’t changed size.
Gatineau: It’s becoming such a tough market, too.
Hill: We read just as much as we used to, we can just buy much bigger films now. But as the market has changed so much, the amount of product is much less.
Gatineau: It’s less, and everybody goes after the same ones.
Troy: And so they become inflated in price as well, because everybody wants them. And the days of us going and buying foreign language and documentary are virtually over.
Gatineau: When I was at Miramax, we bought all those foreign language films. I don’t think they’ve [TWC] bought anything foreign since The Artist. Which was silent (laughs). The market has changed so much that some art-house film that worked well three or four years ago would not even get released today. It’s tough.
Has the streaming revolution created pressure on the theatrical side?
Troy: It hasn’t really created a lot of pressure on theatrical yet. We’re probably starting to see a difference in terms of what’s happening with the home entertainment market. DVD is definitely declining. Catch-up television is really affecting EST; the iTunes model. As far as SVOD [goes], a lot of the subscription-based services, be it Stan or Presto or Netflix, are not in that realm of paying huge sums for film. There’s a lot of excitement around TV. Thankfully we’ve got something like The Walking Dead, which can really drive a value deal. The value that’s placed on film by our SVOD subscribers in this country is not huge as of yet.
So the IP you’re developing is very much aiming to be international?
Hill: Absolutely.
Gatineau: But we do look at all the local projects.
Hill: We’re all still dedicated to Australian films for Australian audiences.
Troy: We set up this TV division – and we’re working with features – on some really interesting international drama for international TV audiences, but we will of course start to develop productions in the local arena. Projects that we can either sell the format [on] or sell the original tape to certain territories. Certainly there are locally-based projects that really speak quite strongly to us, that we’re already starting to work on. But ideally for us, in the drama sector, it has to be international.
Hill: And on the features side, too.
So when and why do you decide to take that risk on an Australian film? For instance Wide Open Sky, the local doc you released in April.
Hill: That was a straight acquisition. We saw it and we liked it. It’s very rare that you see a film on completion and buy it these days.
Gatineau: Especially documentary. It’s not easy.
Especially one without a profile, like that film.
Hill: It’s harder and harder to do documentaries, but that’s where we began. Touching the Void, Ballets Russes, Spellbound. We’re doing these huge films, but we’re still doing films that the team loves working on.
Troy: And you can see the difference in a team when you deliver on something like Amy. The joy in everybody’s involvement in a great box office. I don’t think we’ve ever become cookie-cutter in our approach [to] going to market.
Gatineau: It’s the same both with the eOne Australia slate and Hopscotch slate. It’s very diverse. We have some co-productions, some prestige dramas, some comedy, romance and sci-fi.
Are there any Australian projects you’re actively developing rather than just acquiring?
Troy: Many.
Hill: Going back to something like Somersault or Mao’s Last Dancer, we’ve always had a profile in the local industry as an executive producer-type distributor. Developing and producing ourselves. Even [with] The Sapphires, we came on really early. Same with Cleverman and The Slap. You have to engage earlier when it’s a local project. To that end, we’ve got a first-look deal with Aquarius Films. We’re engaged on their product right from concept stage. We’ve got co-development deals in place with Revlover Films and Goalpost.
Gatineau: At Hopscotch I find we either originate our own projects or we come in later [and] co-produce with a company that needs it. We can pretty much handle whatever the project needs: cast, development, whatever.
Troy: At various stages, our slate has probably been more weighted to international films, and we might have a year where we have less Australian films. But when you have those Australian films that break out a little bit internationally but really connect with local audiences, it’s such a joy.
Hill: There’s nothing like working on those films.
Troy: You really see it go right through from early development to theatrical release down through every one of the ancillaries. The Sapphires is a key example of that. But even working on a smaller film like Wish You Were Here. Angie Fielder was working out of the office at the time through Enterprise funding, and you could see the team connecting in a certain way. I’ve said it a million times: working on an Australian film can be way harder than on an international film – because the expectations, the proximity, your relationships with the producers and the crew and the cast, become very intermingled.
Hill: [But] can be very rewarding.
Troy: Yeah. We had Water Diviner, Sapphires, Mao’s Last Dancer, Wish You Were Here, Somersault – fantastic. But we did have a year [2014] where there was a lot of Australian films back to back – and not just ours – aiming at a kind of late-teen, early 20’s male demographic who are hard to get to the cinema anyway. It was a series of Australian films not working. There was a real sense of doom and gloom, whereas [now] I think there’s a lot of positivity.
Hill: And off the back of that year [there] was The Water Diviner and Paper Planes and The Dressmaker and Oddball and Blinky Bill. So there was a bad year, then there was a great year.
Before Wide Open Sky, was The Water Diviner your last Aussie release? If you don’t count Gods of Egypt.
Troy: For the home entertainment and digital release [of Gods of Egypt], the ancillaries have been off the charts.
How did Wide Open Sky go?
Hill: It was a small film.
Troy: I think we went in knowing what it was. We just loved it and love having it in the catalogue.
Hill: It’s always a little disappointing when people don’t connect with a film on a level that you did. And we really put so much heart and time and love into it. And so did the filmmakers. You always want it to be a crossover hit, but at the same time only one documentary a year really works. And this year [that] was Sherpa. And that was a phenomenal film and deserved to.
Troy: You have to know what you have, and I think we all knew what we had with Wide Open Sky.
You’ve dabbled in day and date as well.
Troy: Yeah, with The Mule and All This Mayhem, which was one of the most successful documentaries in Australia on iTunes, and it was a very limited theatrical release.
What’s the last twelve months been like? Eye in the Sky must have been a surprise.
Hill: Not a surprise because we thought it was a fantastic film, but the way that it connected with audiences was a surprise, absolutely. It’s been an interesting year; I mean, on the same day we released Dirty Grandpa and Spotlight. According to reviews we had the worst movie and the best, and they both did exceptionally well (laughs).
Gatineau: On the Hopscotch front, we’ve been really immersed in development. We’ve attached Kate Winslet to [a feature about photographer] Lee Miller, we have another great actress on All That I Am, the Anna Funder novel. We have four films in advanced development. And [we’ve got] one TV project in advanced development with Jude. And another one that’s in early development. We also optioned Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything, as a factual series.
Troy: It’s been an interesting year in film, because some of those bigger theatrical franchises didn’t really hit home for us. The Divergent series, Now You See Me 2; they performed, but not to expectations. So you have wins like Amy or Spotlight, [and] you’ve got films like Florence Foster Jenkins just not hitting the mark with that older audience that we thought it might.
Hill: It wasn’t Philomena, which did $15 million for us across AU/NZ.
Troy: But it’s a changed market. I think about this with TV all the time. Because television ratings are just so all over the place. I’ll talk to the home ent. team and they’ll go over to Fox, and Fox will say: ‘well, what did Cleverman do in the overnights’? But it’s not just about that anymore It’s about iView and people watching at different times. Ratings are no longer definitive. In terms of this year, we’re very excited to be off to LA in August to pitch our first TV show. It’s in development with Foxtel and John Collee’s writing it. Great pilot [script].
Are adaptations a way to tap into that Dressmaker market that Florence Foster Jenkins was going for, given that women read more than men?
Troy: They read, full stop (laughs).
How many adaptations are you working on?
Gatineau: Three features in advanced development.
Troy: With TV, there’s one franchise we’re doing with Netflix, early development only. Then there’s the Bill Bryson, which is with Hopscotch. Without a doubt, having that underlying IP helps. It helps just going in to pitch to a broadcaster, and to galvanize people and help finance.
Gatineau: I think it’s always the same balance between adaptations and originals. It hasn’t changed so much.
Hill: On the co-development/acquisitions side we’ve also got a few adaptations.
Do you have many female leads fronting what you have in development?
Gatineau: Two of the Hopscotch Features projects are [about] two strong female characters.
Troy: Our two TV shows furthest in development have female leads. I love what Foxtel are trying to do. That’s obviously an audience that is working for them. They’ve got Wentworth, The Kettering Incident, Secret City.
Gatineau: We always try to have some female voices in our projects.
Hill: I think it helps that we’re a predominantly female team. I think there’s 40 women here, and about five [men].
Are the majority of scripts you’re seeing written by men?
All: Yes.
How much that you’re reading is geared towards that female market, even if it’s not written by a woman?
Gatineau: Right now, older women is the market for theatrical.
Hill: We don’t really look at who’s written it, we look at who it’s written for.