4 minute read
Incendo’s Gavin Reardon looks at opportunities in the scripted market
Incendiary ambitions
Incendo’s Gavin Reardon tells Jordan Pinto how the Canadian producer-distributor has retooled to capitalise on opportunities in the international scripted market.
Concept art for Monster Inside
Montreal-based Incendo has built a reputation as a prolifi c producer of premium TV movies over the past two decades. It has also dabbled in the high-end drama space on the multi-partner coproduction Versailles, a French historical drama set during the reign of Louis XIV, which ran for three seasons from 2015 to 2018.
More recently, Incendo has retooled its scripted team with the addition of former Spotify and Dynamic Television exec Holly Hines and veteran scripted exec Graham Ludlow as it looks to capitalise on new opportunities in scripted. C21 caught up with Gavin Reardon, the company’s head of international sales and coproductions, who arrives at Content London with a slate of scripted projects, including Canada-Ukraine coproduction Monster Inside.
What has Incendo’s recent scripted expansion looked like? We brought Holly and Graham in to help the company focus on three prongs: Canada, US/ international and our distribution operation.
First, we are developing content tailored specifi cally for the Canadian market. We have a very strong distribution arm in Canada that allows us to speak to local broadcasters every day, so we're very plugged in to that market.
Second, we have projects we're pitching in the US fi rst, which Holly is overseeing. That’s something fairly new for us. Typically, we were focused more on the international coproduction market, which was how we put together Versailles, for instance, on which we were the minority Canadian copro partner. We have been looking for projects to join in a similar fashion – projects that have some components already in place internationally, either an anchor broadcaster in Europe or the majority of the fi nancing in place. But now we’re focusing on the US too.
And fi nally, with our large Canadian distribution arm, we’re able to generate more revenue out of Canada than most other companies.
Tell us about the genesis of werewolf drama Monster Inside. I went to Kyiv Media Week in 2019 and got talking to a friend, Kateryna Vyshnevska, who has been at Film.UA Group for many years, about different ideas and projects. She told me she was working on something
Gavin Reardon
”
with [Stockholm-based] Eccho Rights. It was something that made sense for everybody for different reasons.
For Incendo, it was a genre project but it had a level of humour that we liked and thought would work for the North American market. The fact the Canada-Ukraine coproduction treaty was ratifi ed around the time of that market gave us the impetus to fi gure it out. Obviously, the last year has been challenging, but it gave us time to develop it to the point where we feel it's ready to talk about. What other types of scripted content are you developing? Things with a broad, four-quadrant interest that you could theoretically get everyone at home watching. Admittedly Versailles wasn't that, but we are looking for shows that are more general viewing. We're interested in procedurals, true crime series and cozy mysteries, as well as period pieces, though less so today than we have been in the past. I can't think of anything that we're not at least reading to see how it can be put together.
What challenges does Incendo face as it looks to break into the scripted series market? After Versailles, it might feel like there's been a lull, but that hasn’t really been the case. We’ve been developing projects we believe in, and we're in a market that's so competitive and congested that things just take a long time. We have projects that have been in development for quite a while with big broadcasters, with Amazon, for example. Versailles itself took six years to go from the fi rst meeting to being on air.
It's highly competitive to try to attach talent. You can argue whether that's more or less necessary today than it was two years ago, but there's so much production going on that it's diffi cult to get talent.
Another challenge is standing out in a competitive market. We've explored many different ways – from how we market content we're pitching, to the materials we put out, who we pitch, how we pitch and at what time of year. Everybody needs something at some time, it's just making sure you're pitching the right thing for the right person at the right time.
Catch up with Gavin Reardon and the Monster Inside team at the Hot Properties: Drama session today at 10.30am in Hall 2.
