‘Cat’s Eyes’ Is A Female-Driven, Manga-Adapted Art Heist Drama Stealing The Limelight In France — SkimNews
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- Cat's Eyes Season 2 premieres on TF1 on October 12, with the three sisters pulling off art heists at landmark French sites including Mont St Michel, Musée d'Orsay, Centre Pompidou, and Montparnasse Tower — a step up from Season 1's Eiffel Tower, Louvre, and Versailles set-pieces.
- Season 1 averaged 5.3 million viewers per episode in France and captured a 41% audience share among 15-24 year-olds, per Deadline.
- Disney+ acquired EMEA rights to Season 1, making Cat's Eyes available from December 2026 in the UK, Ireland, the Nordics, Benelux, Central Europe, Türkiye, and South Africa, joining Hulu's existing U.S. rights.
- Season 2 has already been pre-bought by Rai, AMC Global Media Iberia, RTL TVI, and RTS, with Season 1 having sold into more than 100 territories ahead of next month's MIPCOM.
- Producers Big Band Story — Benjamin Dupont-Jubien and Mehdi Sabbar — spent five years negotiating rights from Hojo starting in 2018, with filming not beginning until 2023; the overall production budget is €25M ($28.3M) with Germany's ZDF co-producing alongside TF1.
- Director Alexandre Laurent says he felt freer to impose more of himself on Season 2 after Hojo approved the first season, noting that 'there's a bit more freedom of tone in the second season' once action sequencing stopped consuming his focus.
- The manga source — Tsukasa Hojo's 1980s Cat's Eye, previously adapted into a popular anime — was chosen partly because France is the biggest manga market in Europe, with the producers noting Hojo cared more about preserving the spirit and characters than replicating the plot.
- Hojo's conditions on the adaptation included that the cat's eyes don't kill people and 'wouldn't rob a bank to get money,' with the heroines restricted to reclaiming paintings that belonged to their missing father.
Why it matters: Cat's Eyes is a rare three-market adaptation pipeline — Japanese manga IP into a French live-action series traveling back into global streaming — and the Disney+ EMEA pickup alongside Hulu's U.S. deal gives it genuinely hemispheric reach ahead of MIPCOM, validating French broadcasters as more than just domestic players.
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