Banijay's Scripted Chief: Writers Over Market Trends — SkimNews
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- Steve Matthews, head of scripted at Banijay Entertainment, said at Iberseries & Platino Industria that the group's 170 labels across 25 territories prioritize writers over scale or market intelligence, running twice-yearly four-day boot camps to develop ideas and scripts across the network.
- Maria Grazia Vairo of Italy's Groenlandia said streamers are seeking original stories drawn from true events and overlooked characters; her company's series about Italian pop band 883 was originally planned as a one-season project before becoming a returning hit.
- Simone Oliviera of Brazil's A Fábrica emphasized building long-term creator relationships, noting the company is developing multiple projects with writer Raphael Montes, including adaptations and original series.
- Carolina Bang, CEO of Spain's Pokeepsie Films, said the company moved into young-adult storytelling after she discovered the books younger members of her family were reading and spent years trying to get the project made.
- Matthews cautioned against using market intelligence as a development recipe: "You never set out to make a commercial show... It won't be good. And therefore, it won't be commercial either."
- Matthews acknowledged the scripted business is contracting and "there's a lot less work to go around," but argued the squeeze will raise the bar, with good shows still getting made and manufactured ones falling away.
Why it matters: As commissioning tightens across Europe's scripted sector, Banijay's 170-label network is positioning itself as a counterweight to trend-driven greenlighting — Matthews argued that scale lets labels stay nimble while absorbing risk, but only if writers lead the development. For streamers who increasingly buy by genre rather than by writer, that stance puts pressure on their own development pipelines to find original material.
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