Being an independent producer was never easy. But these days, it’s near impossible. Even before the dual writers and actors strikes, changes in the international Film and TV market had made life tough for the indies. Old models of art house moviemaking have been ravaged by a combination of decline in the specialty box office, the collapse of ancillary revenue for home entertainment and TV licensing, and the more recent pullback by streaming companies, who have begun to back fewer, and more mainstream, movies.

But one indie production company has gone from making just a handful of movies a year to dozens, finding a way to turn the turbulent new reality into a business model for making cutting-edge art house cinema that, shockingly, can actually turn a profit. It’s the company behind five of the most hotly anticipated titles at the Venice Film Festival this year: Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, starring Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo; Sofia Coppola’s Elvis-era biopic Priscilla (see page 28); Stefano Sollima’s crime drama Adagio, with Italian stars Pierfrancesco Favino (The Traitor) and Toni Servillo (The Great Beauty); Enea, Pietro Castellitto’s follow-up to his breakout debut, The Predators; and Saverio Costanzo’s Finally Dawn, featuring Lily James, Willem Dafoe and newcomer Rebecca Antonaci. The same company has an upcoming slate featuring Conclave, Edward Berger’s follow-up to Oscar sensation All Quiet on the Western Front; Without Blood, Angelina Jolie’s latest directorial effort, starring Salma Hayek; and Queer, Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novel, starring Drew Starkey and Daniel Craig.

The company is Fremantle, picked by The Hollywood Reporter for its inaugural International Producer of the Year award. THR will present the honor to Fremantle at a gala event at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 3.

Based in London, Fremantle is independent, but that doesn’t mean it’s small. A subsidiary of German media giant RTL Group, itself a subsidiary of global conglomerate Bertelsmann (owner of publisher Penguin Random House and music label BMG), Fremantle is actually massive. Last year, company revenue topped $2.5 billion and, since 2021, the group has been on a buying spree, spending upward of $270 million on a total of 11 companies.

But while group COO Andrea Scrosati likes to say Fremantle has “film in its blood” — one of Fremantle’s founding companies, Germany’s UFA, was the studio behind such early 20th-century classics as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the Marlene Dietrich starrer The Blue Angel — until very recently the group was best known as the producer of reality TV and game show franchises like The X Factor, Got Talent and The Price Is Right. (Nonscripted TV is still the core of the company’s business.) When Fremantle started its push into fiction production a decade ago, with the acquisition of European companies including Denmark’s Miso Film (producer of Nordic noir hit Wallander and HBO’s The Investigation) in 2013 and Italy’s Wildside (The Young Pope) in 2015, most people still associated the name Fremantle with shiny floors and sparkling spandex.

“Our agents in the U.S. were shocked,” says Miso Film’s Peter Bose of his decision to sell to Fremantle. “They said: ‘You’re selling a drama company to the Price Is Right guys?’”

A decade on, says Scrosati, “a lot of the big agencies still haven’t connected the dots” between Poor Things and Normal People producer Element Pictures, Italy’s The Apartment (Priscilla, Bones and All, My Brilliant Friend) and Wildside (The Eight Mountains, Finally Dawn), to Fremantle, their common parent company. Despite spending more than a quarter of a billion dollars, Fremantle has managed to fly under the radar to become one of the world’s top producers of art house and specialty cinema.

Christian Vesper, the former Sundance Channel exec who runs Fremantle’s Global Drama division, says that after moving into top-tier TV drama with the likes of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope, the shift to feature films came naturally.

“We realized the directors and writers — the talent we wanted to work with — wanted to make films,” says Vesper. “If we could provide a home for both, it could be a real win.”

Says Lorenzo Mieli, CEO of The Apartment, “When a talent walks in the door and they tell you what they want to do, you can’t tell them, ‘We don’t do that.’ You find a way to make what they want to make.”

If the model doesn’t fit, in other words, find a new model.

Back when Mieli was CEO of Fremantle Italy before the company had started its push into drama, he was tasked with producing an Italian version of The X-Factor.

“I didn’t watch those kinds of reality shows so I wanted to make something that was more to my taste,” Mieli recalls.

His first idea was to ask Paolo Sorrentino — Oscar-winning film director Paolo Sorrentino — to be a judge.

“Paolo was tempted but he said no,” says Meili. “But we kept in touch, and a few years later he brought me the idea for The Young Pope.“

For the Italian market, the high-end series — starring Jude Law and Diane Keaton — was crazy ambitious. Pay-TV group Sky Italia — Scrosati was their head of programming at the time —got on board but there was still a big budget gap.

“You had the big stars on pay-or-play, this is before HBO got involved, and there were no comparable projects out there, no track record of anyone who had tried to do something like this,” says The Young Pope producer Mario Gianani, currently Wildside CEO and one of the Rome production company’s co-founders, alongside Mieli. “For an independent producer, it would have been a massive risk to try and finance it. But Fremantle came in, they took on that risk. They were a big industrial operation, with global reach and they wanted producers like us with ambition, who wanted to go further than we could manage as a small independent.”

Since The Young Pope, its first global international drama hit, Fremantle has only gotten more ambitious. Take The Apartment. The Rome company’s upcoming slate includes not just Priscilla, Queer and Jolie’s Without Blood, but the AppleTV+ original Ferrari, from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, the biggest series to be produced and shot in Italy, the Benito Mussolini’s drama M from Darkest Hour director Joe Wright, and The Lehman Trilogy, a high-end series from Oscar-winning French writer/director Florian Zeller (The Father) based on Stefano Massini’s Tony Award-winning play.

With each production, Scrosati says, Fremantle finds, or invents, a business model to get it made.

“It’s not like working for a very structured, global or even national player that is vertically integrated, where you maybe get a lot of money upfront but it is very clear how you film will get made and where it will end up,” he says. “You do a deal with Netflix, your film will land on Netflix, which is fine. But our pitch to talent is exactly the opposite. We say: If you come to us with your project, we’re going to invest to make it the strongest project in the world, and then, together, we’ll go out and find the right home for it.”

It wasn’t the original plan, but this project-first, model-second approach has created new ways to finance and distribute indie film, pointing to a possible future for the struggling industry.

“Even before COVID, everybody knew the old model, the windowing system, wasn’t working anymore,” says Scrosati, referencing the traditional distribution process for indie films, which recouped their production costs via separate exploitation “windows” in movie theaters, home video, pay TV/streaming and free-to-air television. “What the pandemic did, in three weeks, was basically wipe out the old system altogether, showing that, except for the blockbusters, the theatrical window didn’t really exist.”

What most traditional indie producers and distributors saw as a disaster, Fremantle viewed as an opportunity.

“If you are willing to take a risk, there are literally hundreds of different business models you can use to make an independent movie these days,” says Scrosati. “You can sell it to a global streamer, you can do a deal with a studio distributor and take off separate territories, you can presell to a domestic buyer like an A24 and then go out territory by territory worldwide. If producers are willing to take risks, there are all these possibilities out there to make independent movies.”

Thomas Rabe, CEO of Fremantle parent RTL Group, and Chairman and CEO of Bertelsmann, acknowledges that compared with non-scripted reality TV and game shows, drama “is arguably more risky, and more capital intensive. But it is key for partnering with top creatives, expanding the relationship with streamers around the world and creating library value…Premium content and storytelling are at Fremantle’s core – whether entertainment, drama or documentaries. In 2022, Fremantle generated 35 percent of its total revenue from drama and film productions, with adequate returns.”

Rabe has put his — or more accurately RTL’s — money where his mouth is, backing Fremantle in an unprecedented buying spree that has seen the group spend more than a quarter billion Euros ($270 million) on M&A deals, snatching up indie production outfits like U.K.-based Dancing Ledge (The Responder), Italy’s Lux Vide (Devils, Leonardo), Shtisel producer Abot Hameiri in Israel, Belgium’s A-Team, and a series of 12 production labels — including Norway’s Monster, Finland’s Moskito Television, and Sweden’s Baluba — from Nordic Entertainment Group. They have also taken minority stakes in groups like Henrik Bastin’s Fabel Entertainment, producers of Bosch.

Since its investment outlay was no match for the deep pockets of Netflix, Amazon or Apple, Fremantle offered something else. Instead of money, its pitch to prospective acquisition targets, as well as to directors and acting talents, was to give more creative autonomy. Along the lines of: Join us and make exactly the film you want to make, and let us find a model that makes it work financially.

“Fremantle can guarantee a director a [sort of] capital that no budget can deliver: freedom,” says director Sorrentino, whose collaboration deal with Fremantle’s The Apartment has delivered such features as the Oscar-nominated The Hand of God, which took a theatrical bow in multiple international territories alongside its global Netflix release. “[They have] a production idea that combines craftsmanship with a model that Andrea Scrosati has helped to make more and more international. For me [that’s] priceless.”

“They provide a framework within which we can develop our own ideas and then their international network provides the support to help get them made,” notes British director Michael Winterbottom, whose production shingle Revolution Films signed a first-look deal with Fremantle in 2020. The first production under the agreement was Kenneth Branagh-starrer This England, produced together with Richard Brown shingle Passenger, which the Outlaw King and True Detective producer set up, with Fremantle’s support, in 2019. Fremantle took full control of the company late last year. It now sits within the company’s Global Drama division.

“For a small independent company like Revolution Films,” notes Winterbottom “[Fremantle] are the perfect home.”

Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe, co-founders of Irish boutique Element Pictures say Fremantle has been “extremely hands off” since they acquired a majority stake in the production company behind Poor Things and hit BBC/Hulu series Normal People.

“Our relationships with talent are the same, our approach to projects is the same,” says Lowe, “what has changed is we have access to this global Fremantle network, which gives us new ways of financing and distributing the projects we want to make.”

When Miso Film secured the rights to tell the story of the murder of Swedish journalist Kim Wall by submarine inventor Peter Madsen— whose case had become an international sensation — they initially took the project to Netflix, with whom they’d made Danish sci-fi series Rain.

“But we knew we wanted to keep as many international rights as possible because there was a huge interest in this IP, the case had been headline news around the world,” says Miso Film’s Peter Bose. “In the end, we secured commissions with two public broadcasters — TV2 in Denmark and SVT in Sweden, we did a few presales, including RTL in German and the BBC, and then Fremantle stepped in with a solid minium guarantee to cover the budget gap.”

The gamble paid off when the series — directed by Tobias Lindholm and sold internationally as The Investigation — was picked up for North America by HBO Max.

Winterbottom’s This England is another example of Fremantle’s flexibility. On its surface, the project is a very British affair: A six-part docudrama following the events surrounding Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his government in the face of the first wave of COVID-19 in the U.K.. But when Winterbottom attached Kenneth Branagh to play Johnson, Fremantle saw global potential. The project was set up with pay-TV group Sky in the U.K., with Fremantle, Passenger and Revolution Films co-producing. Fremantle took over international rights and signed deals with top-end pay-TV channels from Spain’s Movistar+, to Viaplay in Scandinavia, M-Net in South Africa and BBC First in Australia.

Global Drama has been active, inking first-look deals with the likes of Angelina Jolie’s Jolie Productions; Edward Berger’s Nine Hours; Sinestra, from director Johan Renck (Chernobyl) and producer Michael Parets; Invention Studios, the production outfit set up by Ben Stiller’s production partner Nicholas Weinstock, an executive producer on Apple TV+ series Severance; Luther and The Mosquito Coast showrunner Neil Cross; Michael Winterbottom’s Revolution Studios; and Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín’s Fabula, the Chilean/Mexican/U.S. company behind the Oscar-nominated Spencer and Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman.

Fremantle’s Global Drama division has been busy signing up top talent, including Angelina Jolie, to first look and development deals.

“We talk a lot about being the place that creatives want to call home. And the talent partnerships we have in place, the companies we have invested in and the content we are making epitomizes this,” says Fremantle Group CEO Jennifer Mullin. 

One of the goals of Vesper’s Global Drama outfit is to bring together partners within Fremantle’s network and encourage cross-border co-productions and collaborations. Jolie’s Without Blood, for example, is a co-production of Fremantle, its subsidiary The Apartment, Jolie Productions and De Maio Entertainment, the outfit set up by former Endeavor Content partner Lorenzo De Maio, which has a long-term partnership deal with Fremantle.

“Fremantle, while savvy to Hollywood, [has] a more European sensibility,” says Jolie in an email to THR. “I have found they are interested in learning from others around the globe. I look forward to further collaboration with them.”

Fremantle’s flexible, bespoke approach to film financing and distribution — “if you go through our full slate, the 30 movies we have in production right now,” says Scrosati, “you probably won’t find one with the same business model as the other” — dovetails nicely with the strategic shift of global streaming companies, which after years of paying top dollar to secure movies exclusively worldwide, have begun to cut their acquisitions budgets and become more accommodating to Fremantle’s indie models, willing to give up some international territories on a movie in exchange for a reduced price tag.

“I think the streamers still want to have a toe in in quality filmmaking, but not at the same risk level as in the past,” says Vesper. “And I think that because of the way we work, we can provide a new way forward for that.”

Mario Gianani, CEO of Wildside, was there at the start of Fremantle’s move from shiny floors to indie film and has seen how the company’s ambition has grown. (With backing from RTL, Fremantle has set a goal of hitting $3.3 billion in revenue by 2025, with a lot of that expansion coming from drama and film production.) But the original indie spirit has remained.

“Back then, 2015 or so, we were a little bit more the pirates. Now we’re more of a navy,” says Gianani. “But the approach hasn’t changed. It’s still all about supporting the talents, doing whatever it takes to get the film they want to make, made.” 

This story first appeared in the Aug. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.