Amazon MGM Studios’ Nicole Morganti, head of originals for Southern Europe, and Thomas Dubois, head of originals in France, took the stage at Series Mania Festival in Lille to discuss Prime Video’s ongoing strategy to lure more women and younger demos on the heels of the “Culpables” trilogy.
“We are much more female-centric. We are looking for women audience, all ages, and we are looking after women young adults,” said Morganti. The executive pointed out the company kicked off this strategy in Spain a while ago with the “Culpables” trilogy which was watched by 100 million people globally and was remade in in the U.K. as “My Fault.”
“We started to create a big pipeline in Spain about young adults, and we expanded to the rest of my region (in Southern Europe),” she said, adding that Prime Video recently successfully launched “Love Me Love Me” – based on Stefania S.’s Wattpad book that garnered 24 million reads — in Italy and has announced a second movie is on the way.
Morganti said collaborating with “Wattpad authors” has marked a turning point for the streamer as she noted, “Reading is getting back to be a huge trend.”
“Wattpad is a platform where a lot of young adults go and read (…) and there are fanbases over there, and those fanbases are very entitled about their book,” she said, adding that these partnerships have helped Prime Video to “understand the communities that are behind these IPs.”
After unveiling the first teaser for its upcoming teen series “Campus Drivers, ” Dubois said Prime Video was “open up to new genres” in the field of romances. Citing Sarah Rivens’ “Lakestone,” Dubois said, “It’s a dark romance book that has 26 million viewers on Wattpad that we’re going to adapt in France.”
“We want to try not to replicate the same show all the time because there’s also a limit at some point within this space. We want each show to have its own singularity, and to do so, we are getting into dark romance,” Dubois continued. He mentioned upcoming originals, such as a movie called “Tempête,” which he described as “a survivalist with a touch of romance out of our two main characters.”
“We’re not limited to high school shows that we do love and we have a few in the pipeline, but we also think that we need to be ahead of what our customers are going to expect from us, which is innovate also in that field,” he said.
Beyond romances, Morganti also talked about recent genre film hits on the streamer’s Southern Europe slate, such as “Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End,” a Spanish thriller movie directed by Carles Torrens which she said “went incredibly well around the world as 90% of the audience was outside of Spain.”
“Who would have thought that an apocalyptic zombie story coming from Spain could actually conquer the U.S. and the rest of the world,” she said.
Dubois, meanwhile, talked about leveling up Prime Video’s film output in France with “Masterplan,” a international heist movie directed by Thomas Vincent (“Reacher”), starring Stanley Tucci and Simona Tabasco (“The White Lotus“). The English-language production will mark Prime Video’s first French-Italian Original film and is produced by Gaumont, the French studio behind “Lupin.”
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