New York: Sony Pictures Entertainment is making a new push into some of the world’s fastest growing film and television markets by creating a new unit which will specialise in local language production.
The company has hired Sanford Panitch, who built a similar business for 21st Century Fox’s studio, to run the new unit, part of a tilt towards the international market which extends to the movies Sony Pictures will be commissioning and developing at its Los Angeles headquarters.
“The film slate being produced out of California will have a much more global focus,” said Michael Lynton, chief executive of Sony Entertainment, in an interview. The appointment of Panitch was “an adjunct of that,” he added.
Panitch will be responsible for striking local production deals and developing films and television shows in local languages. He will work alongside Andrea Wong, Sony’s president of international production.
Hollywood movie studios used to pay lip service to the international market and were content to release US content dubbed into local languages. But audiences have voted with their feet. “In most of the markets in the world more than 50 per cent of the theatrical [box office] is local language production,” said Lynton.
He pointed to several growth markets — China, India, Russia and Brazil — where appetite for movies has soared and where Panitch is expected to look for original material that can be turned into films and television shows. The Chinese box office is of particular interest to Hollywood because it is on course to eclipse the US as the world’s largest theatrical market in the next decade.
At Fox, Panitch oversaw all of the company’s local production activities, producing a slate of international films which grossed more than $900 million in total box office receipts over six years.
Panitch will be reunited with his former colleague Tom Rothman when he starts at Sony at the beginning of June. Rothman, the former head of the Fox studio, was recently appointed as the chairman of Sony’s Motion Picture Group, replacing Amy Pascal.
Pascal left the studio in the wake of last November’s devastating cyber attack on Sony Pictures but will continue to make movies for the company as an independent producer. The studio behind the Spider-Man and James Bond franchises has undergone a torrid time since it fell victim to the attack the US has blamed on North Korean hackers.
The hackers deleted a trove of internal company data and published employee information and confidential emails online — including a string of embarrassing and racially charged emails between Pascal and Scott Rudin, a producer.
— Financial Times
