VideoAge International October 2018

(Continued from Page 14) The buying contingent from Italy’s RAI at the NBCUniversal L.A. Screenings luncheon Sonar’s Kylie Munnich, Louise Oliver, David Ellender and Hendrik van Daalen screening Das Boat at the Four Seasons Hotel October 2018 V I D E O A G E The L.A. Screenings 2018 16 the Culver City studio is ripe for a takeover by one of the deep-pocketed Telcos or Silicon Valley groups. Then there was the legal drama between CBS’s Leslie Moonves and Shari Redstone, CBS- Viacom’s largest shareholder, over the future of the two companies if they were to be re-merged. On the Disney lot in Burbank, there were looming clouds from NBCUniversal parent company Comcast’s bid, first for the Fox group, and later, for just some of Fox’s assets. And, at Warner Bros., talk centered on the imminent AT&T acquisition of the studio. If not discussing the studios themselves, L.A. Screenings participants were talking about the tongue-twister U.S. TV trend of reboots, remakes, revivals, spin-offs, and formats, all aimingat “cutting through the clutter” and getting a new generation of viewers without needing to experimentwithuntested, yet inno- vative concepts. Revivals are TV shows with their original casts, settings, and story-lines left intact. An example of this is Roseanne , a show that Disney canceled at the end of May, which made for some real- life post-L.A. Screenings drama. A reboot is when the TV show keeps the same title, but new characters are created. A remake is a new version of an old series (e.g., Magnum P.I.). A spin-off is created from a rib of a series already airing on television, like Station 19 , which was spun off from Grey’s Anatomy . A format is a local version of a foreign series (e.g., Grand Hotel from the original Gran Hotel from Spain’s A3). In terms of the number of new shows, the U.S. studios produced 111 pilots, of which 76 were for broadcast television, 16 were for streaming services, eight were for premium services (e.g., Show- time), and 11 were for cable (out of the 31 commissioned by cable TV networks). The broadcasters picked up 38 new series. Last year, the broadcast nets picked up 47 of 75 (or 63 percent) of the pi- lots that had been commissioned. The 55th annual L.A. Scree- nings saw 84 exhibiting compa- nies at the InterContinental Hotel located in the Century City area of Los Angeles, and was compri- sed of a mix of indie companies and U.S. studios, representing 17 countries. New this year was a series of conferences organized by NATPE under the banner “L.A. Scree- nings Independents.” In order to access all the NATPE-sponsored activities, including the summit, (Continued on Page 20) A wrong beyond words. The fight to make it right. WWW.AMCSTUDIOSINTERNATIONAL.COM AMCSTUDIOSSALES@AMCNETWORKS.COM PREMIERE SCREENING AT CONTENT LONDON 29 NOVEMBER BASED ON TRUE EVENTS | 8X60 We were given tainted blood.