As Studio 100 International gears up for its Annecy activities, CEO Martin Krieger talks to ScreenMDM about its evolving co-production strategy, production efficiencies, the crucial role of partnerships, including its Maya the Bee alliance with Animaj, and its approach to YouTube.
How is your co-pro business evolving? And what pieces of advice can you share about how to execute a good collaboration?
Co-production has evolved significantly over the past few years, both for feature films and premium animated series. The strongest projects today are built through genuine creative partnerships from the earliest stages, rather than being structured primarily around financing.
For us, successful co-productions are about bringing together complementary creative perspectives, talent, and expertise. Audiences today are no longer looking for generic global storytelling—they respond to worlds that feel authentic, culturally rooted, and emotionally distinctive.
That approach is reflected in projects like the feature film Halloween vs. Day of the Dead, currently slated for 2029. The project draws on two highly recognizable cultural mythologies while being designed from the outset with both strong creative identity and global audience potential in mind.
At Studio 100 International, our role is to connect creative ambition with production expertise, distribution capabilities, and long-term franchise development. The most successful co-productions are those in which partners are not just financing the same project but actively building the same brand together.
How are you scaling your production capabilities, and what advantages do they provide you in this landscape?
For us, scaling production is less about building larger studios and more about building the right creative and production network. The combination of Studio Isar Animation, 3Doubles Producciones, and a trusted network of production partners across Europe allows us to scale creatively while remaining flexible and project-focused. Our stake in 3Doubles Producciones further strengthens that model, while Studio Isar Animation provides valuable in-house creative and production expertise. Together, they enable us to maintain strong creative oversight while adapting production structures to the specific needs of each project.
In today’s market, this combination of continuity, flexibility, and international collaboration is not only increasingly important but also a clear competitive advantage. It allows us to deliver high-quality productions while remaining responsive to the needs of broadcasters, co-production partners, and platforms.
Tell us about this overall embrace of partnerships, like the one with Animaj, as you continue to navigate the challenges of the ecosystem.
Partnerships have become strategically important as the industry continues to evolve across platforms, formats, and audience behaviors. Our collaboration with Animaj is a good example of how carefully chosen partnerships can help established IP evolve and thrive in a more digital-first environment.
Maya the Bee is an iconic brand with recognition across generations. Together with Animaj, our goal is to preserve the heart of the brand while evolving how and where audiences engage with it—from linear television to YouTube, short-form content, games, and other digital experiences.
The partnership brings together complementary strengths: Studio 100 International’s expertise in storytelling, production, theatrical films, and franchise management alongside Animaj’s digital-first approach and AI-powered production capabilities.
From a broader perspective, we believe strong IP today requires the right partners at the right moments—whether in production, distribution, digital growth, or audience engagement. The objective is not partnership for its own sake, but ensuring that our brands remain relevant, accessible, and engaging for future generations.”
How are you looking at YouTube? Are you seeding new content there? Is it more of a marketing opportunity?
For kids’ content, YouTube is no longer an alternative platform. It is often the first point of contact between audiences and a brand. That is why YouTube plays a central role in our overall distribution and audience strategy. We produce new content for our channels every day and have a dedicated content team creating clips, shorts, and platform-specific formats. This allows us to stay closely connected to audience behavior, consumption trends, and emerging opportunities. What has changed significantly is that YouTube is no longer only relevant for viewers. Retailers, who traditionally focused on linear television as the primary driver of brand awareness, are more and more expecting brands to demonstrate a strong YouTube presence as well.
At the same time, the insights we gain from these platforms increasingly influence how characters, stories, and formats are developed, positioned, and expanded across multiple platforms.
So, while YouTube remains a powerful audience-development and marketing tool, it has also become an important content destination and a key driver for long-term franchise growth.
How is demand for animated features, and how are you monetizing those across the value chain?
Theatrical animation remains one of the few content categories capable of creating true event moments for family audiences. What has changed, however, is audience expectation. Animation today is no longer seen exclusively as children’s entertainment. Today’s audiences more than ever expect sophisticated storytelling, emotional depth, and cinematic production quality that can appeal across generations.
The Latvian film Flow, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature earlier this year, clearly demonstrates that outstanding storytelling and artistic excellence can compete successfully alongside major studio productions. This is an encouraging development for the industry and creates exciting opportunities for more distinctive international projects.
For us, feature films are particularly attractive because they allow us to build long-term franchises across multiple revenue streams. Projects such as Arnie & Barney, the first spin-off from the Maya the Bee universe, or the successful 100% Wolf franchise are strong examples of how animated features can evolve into much broader brand ecosystems.
We always approach projects from a 360-degree perspective—spanning theatrical distribution, streaming, consumer products, digital media, publishing, music, live entertainment, and theme parks. That integrated strategy allows us to extend the lifecycle, visibility, and long-term value of our brands far beyond the initial theatrical release.
What do you see as the greatest opportunities for the company in the 6 to 12 months ahead?
Our ambition is not to grow bigger for the sake of scale. It is to build increasingly distinctive European brands with genuine international resonance. In today’s market, success is less about size alone and more about creating high-quality IP with a clear creative identity and lasting audience relevance.
Over the next 6 to 12 months, we aim to further expand our co-production activities, strengthen our premium animation slate, and deepen collaborations across production, financing, and digital distribution.
At the same time, we continue to invest in highly efficient production structures and targeted AI-supported workflows that create meaningful operational value and support our creative teams to work with greater effectiveness. Ultimately, our ambition is to build franchises that remain relevant across platforms, audiences, and generations—not just for a release cycle, but for decades.
The market schedule has been massively reshaped over the last few years. What role does Mifa/Annecy play for you today?
Annecy has become one of the few places where creative development, production, and distribution decisions all happen within the same week. That makes Mifa even more important for Studio 100 International. It is one of the rare markets where producers, broadcasters, streaming platforms, distributors, and creative talent come together to actively shape future projects.
For us, Annecy is not just a marketplace for finished content. It is where future partnerships are formed, co-productions are initiated, and new IP starts to take shape. Many of the conversations that start in Annecy evolve into long-term collaborations and projects that remain part of our business for years to come.
At a time when the industry is increasingly fragmented, Annecy remains one of the few events that brings together the right people, ideas, and opportunities in one place, making it an essential part of our annual strategy.
Is your Annecy agenda more about onboarding new projects and aligning with producers and commissioners, or is it more of a distribution play as you continue to monetize your lineup?
It is definitely both, although the focus areas are naturally complementary. On the distribution side, Annecy is an important opportunity for us to meet with existing and prospective partners, discuss evolving market needs, and further expand the international reach of our portfolio.
At the same time, Mifa has become progressively valuable for project development and as a networking platform. We use the market to align early with producers, broadcasters, and platforms on upcoming projects, explore co-production opportunities, and identify new creative collaborations that can help shape the next generation of content.
Especially in the current environment, it is important to balance strong catalog exploitation with continuous investment in new ideas and IP development. Annecy allows us to combine both very efficiently, bringing together commercial discussions and creative partnerships in one place.
Let’s talk about the lineup—what’s driving the current slate?
Our current slate is driven by a combination of strong storytelling, distinctive visual identities, and brands with clear long-term potential. For animation, one of the highlights this year is the comedy-adventure series Living Wild from Gaumont Animation, Enanimation, and Toonz Media Group, which immediately stood out to us for its fresh concept and strong visual appeal. Alongside that, projects such as Louca, a football-themed series from Media Valley and Belvision, and Mortina, a visually distinctive series from Cartobaleno and Treehouse Republic, continue to strengthen our portfolio with highly recognizable worlds and characters that connect with audiences across multiple touchpoints.
Beyond animation, the BBC live-action series Gifted, produced by Black Camel Pictures and Media Valley, is also a key focus for us. It is a very ambitious project in terms of both storytelling and production scale, and we were very encouraged to see its successful broadcast launch in the U.K. at the end of last year.
Overall, the lineup reflects our strategy of combining premium new IP, strong creative partnerships, and stories that can travel successfully across markets, platforms, and generations.
