Nicole Morganti, head of Southern European originals at Amazon MGM Studios, and Thomas Dubois, head of French originals, took to the stage at the Series Mania Festival in Lille to talk about Prime Video’s ongoing strategy to attract more women and young demos following the Pulpables trilogy.
“We’re more female-centric. We’re looking for a female audience of all ages, and we also cater to young adult women,” Morganti said. The executive noted that the company launched this strategy a while ago in Spain with the release of the “Culpables” trilogy, which was watched by 100 million people worldwide and was remade as “My Fault” in the UK.
“We started building a big youth pipeline in Spain and expanded to the rest of my region (southern Europe),” she said, adding that Prime Video recently successfully released Love Me Love Me, based on Stefania S.’s Wattpad book, which has been read 24 million times in Italy, and announced that a second film is in production.
Morganti said the collaboration with “the creator of Wattpad” was a turning point for the streamer, noting that “reading is coming back as a big trend.”
“Wattpad is a platform where a lot of young people go to read books (…) and there’s a fan base there, and those fan bases are very entitled to their books,” she said, adding that these partnerships are helping Prime Video “understand the communities behind these IPs.”
After releasing the first teaser for its new teen series Campus Drivers, Dubois said Prime Video is “opening up to new genres” in romance. Director Dubois cited Sarah Rivens’ “Lakestone” and said, “It’s a dark romance novel that has 26 million viewers on Wattpad, and we plan to adapt it in France.”
“We want to avoid recreating the same show all the time, because within this space there is a limit at some point. We want each show to have its own specificity, and to do that we’re going into a dark romance,” Dubois continued. He referred to upcoming original works such as the movie “Tempête,” which he described as “a survivalist with a romantic feel between the two main characters.”
“We have some projects in the works, not just limited to our favorite high school programming, but we also believe we need to be ahead of what our customers expect from us and be innovative in that area as well,” he said.
Beyond romance, Morganti also talked about the streamer’s recent genre hits in Southern Europe, including Carles Torrence’s Spanish thriller Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End, which he said was “incredibly well received around the world because 90% of the audience was outside of Spain.”
“Who would have thought that an apocalyptic zombie story originating in Spain could actually conquer the United States and the rest of the world?” she said.
Meanwhile, Dubois talked about taking Prime Video’s film production to the next level in France with “Master Plan,” an international heist film directed by Thomas Vincent (“Reacher”) and starring Stanley Tucci and Simona Tabasco (“White Lotus”). The English-language film will be Prime Video’s first French-Italian original film and will be produced by Gaumont, the French studio behind “Lupin.”
