TBI Weekly: Navigating the changing face of Canada’s content landscape

Young Werther (Source: Wildling Pictures)

With a Canadian writers’ strike averted earlier this month, Matt Code, president of Wildling Pictures – the Toronto-based firm behind Young Werther and upcoming adaptations of A Death At The Party and Clara Voyant – sets out the challenges and opportunities in Canada’s changing production landscape.

Canada has been an incredibly close partner to a huge number of top-end shows born in Hollywood. Tax breaks in Canada have made it a very appealing place for producers to make their films and TV shows. However, as with other territories, it is undergoing contraction and this transition has led to a reduced number of opportunities for new series in development and production.

As a producer in Toronto, this new production landscape is one we have had to learn to navigate both by understanding its causes, and how to find opportunities in the new world we find ourselves in.

There is not one single cause of this contraction, but the US market’s shift toward larger budget titles with marquee cast certainly has an effect. This is primarily due to our Canadian content regulations, which make it harder to achieve the attributes necessary to qualify.

Some series still benefit from existing and new relationships between Canadian and US broadcasters and platforms, yet the volume of series that have dual homes are declining.

Our experience has been that on both sides of the border buyers are chasing audiences in a way they haven’t recently, and those that have traditionally played in the procedural or half-hour comedy arenas want something fresh but sometimes lack clarity on what specifically that is as their audiences evolve. As a result, even if you’re able to thread that needle in Canada, the predictability isn’t always there to find a US partner.

Matt Code (Source: Wildling Pictures)

Investing in IP and identifying ideas to develop

It certainly feels like there are fewer opportunities for greenlights than there have been in the past five years and that would be the primary challenge.

However, I think the chaos of buyers chasing a market amid transition creates that effect. There are still many opportunities around the world, and we are adapting in hopes of being able to meet them.

Larger-scale production with top-level talent is the current demand and one that’s particularly hard for us Canadians to meet within our system, as certain domestic regulations make it difficult to obtain the talent required. We’re looking at international co-production to mitigate that, although those challenges still exist to some degree within those models.

In development, we’re specifically targeting IP that fits the blueprint for big and glossy international co-productions with marquee talent, and we’ve had some success recently with three large book options and a couple more announcements upcoming.

After restructuring our operations this past year to be more conscious of our costs, we now focus on development and look for producing and/or studio partners to fill specific roles on certain projects rather than carry a back office, and have significantly reduced our production services business. In some ways, it feels like we’ve gone back to the beginning of being very hands on, but with the knowledge and experience of having participated in over 20 feature films and 50 episodes of television, it’s exciting.

International co-productions in Canada

There is growing support within the financing entities in Canada for our participation as a minority partner in more co-productions, which previously has been a challenging premise given the demand for funding. This is further boosted by the growing enthusiasm of Canadians to watch things from outside Hollywood.

The revisions to certain treaties over the past few years also allowed more opportunity for non-treaty country creative participants in certain structures. Together these factors have really opened the opportunity to use international co-production to meet buyers demands.

A key challenge remains being able to act fast enough within the systems of each participating country to meet demands before buyer’s interests change, as co-production tends to be a slow process. But as we tell our potential partners, our experience in international co-production better positions us to navigate the systems quickly.

Our tax incentives are incredibly competitive throughout Canada and at Wildling we have experience stitching together regional incentives across the country to maximize return when looking for specific geographical or technical needs on a project. Combined with common exchange gains and the presence of world-class crews, equipment and facilities, co-production with Canada can play a vital role in meeting the market’s demand for top-tier content outside of Hollywood.