French film stalwart Sara May is stepping into the action and genre space with the launch of her new production banner Sonderworld. The company, which has backing from Goodfellas, is currently developing a slate of elevated, globally-minded action and genre features with the goal of building original IP and franchises out of the French and European markets.
A former TF1 and EuropaCorp exec, May previously spent six years at Netflix as Director of Content Acquisition EMEA. During her time there she was instrumental at getting hit French action thriller Lost Bullet off the ground, which was groundbreaking for the genre in France.
May has been quietly building the new outfit and its slate since she stepped down from the streamer in 2024. Sonderworld has hired former Mars Film and EuropaCorp exec Véronique Cuilhe (Taken, Hitman) as General Manager while May serves as Founder/President.
The company’s pillar, May tells Deadline, will be on action titles and action heroes in France and Europe. “I want to create a metaverse of action,” she said. “I want to show that we can do awesome action in France and Europe for the rest of the world at a fraction of the price. We have the talents, we have the infrastructure for that, and we certainly have the stories and the locations.”
Goodfellas has a first-look deal for international sales and co-productions on all Sonderworld projects. It is currently packaging six films, which are in development – two action, two elevated genre, one “urban” and one dark comedy/crime feature.
While the focus will initially be on French-language productions, May admitted she is making room for English-language projects “when the scope is big enough for the market.”
May said that each project will look to partner with a co-producer in France or elsewhere in Europe, with the exec having a keen eye on UK producers specifically and feels there is scope for more cross-pollination between the two countries.
“I feel like the borders are getting more and more blurry in terms of language,” the Quebec-born exec said. “And there are talents in the UK who would really work with the talents we have in France and vice-versa. In terms of production capacities, these are very dynamic markets that, if they work together properly, there’s no reason we can’t win on both sides by working side by side.”
The strategy is to “scale quickly” across the next two years and build a volume of titles that can be “impactful on the market.”
“When you’ve spent years on the buying and selling side – acquisitions, packaging, negotiating pre-sales – you develop a very precise understanding of why money moves, why a distributor says yes to one project and no to another and why a financier gets comfortable with risk structure. You internalize what bankability actually means and it has nothing to do with the quality of the script alone. It’s about how the whole thing is assembled.”
She continued: “A lot of films fail – not because the story was bad – they fail because the producer wasn’t thinking about risk, sales reality and investor psychology. That’s the gap we close.”
May added that she won’t shy from using new tech, such as AI, in a creator-led and ethical way. “Our approach is creator-first, always. The interest in AI, like any other technology, lies in hybridization and how to give filmmakers stronger, world-building tools, faster iteration and more creative options.”
May was at the crossroads of the first real tectonic changes when Netflix arrived in Europe, starting at the company in 2018. She said the experience “was a masterclass in scale” and during her six year-tenure, she was able to hone in “very quickly on what separates projects that travel globally from the ones that don’t.”
“It’s not often what people expect,” she said. “It’s less about the story being ‘universal’, in some abstract sense, and more about whether it has been packaged with the right talent, the right genre signals and the right market positioning from the start.”
She continued: “What struck me most, and which is why Sonderworld was created, is that there was an increasing gap between the new realities of the market and our industry and, more specifically, how producers operate in a model that is becoming increasingly obsolete with the realities of the market.”
May will be in Cannes next month presenting projects to potential co-production partners.
Source: Read Full Article
