STUDIOCANAL is setting up a joint venture with Hachette Livre to develop a slate of film and TV adaptations based on the publisher’s properties.
The announcement of the new venture, called On Screen, pointed to the untapped opportunities in the book adaptation space, “with publishers still playing a limited role in the long-term value created by these adaptations. This opens a clear opportunity to rethink how literary IP is brought to screen, and to build a sustained pipeline of premium adaptations with global reach.”
Hachette Livre boasts a catalog of more than 100,000 titles. With the joint venture, STUDIOCANAL will act as the preferred studio partner, working across packaging, financing, production, and international distribution. The JV follows the launch of STUDIOCANAL Stories, dedicated to literary adaptations, in 2024.
Arnaud Lagardère, CEO of Hachette Livre, said the deal “marks a new chapter in our ambition to build bridges from books to screen. By bringing in such complementary expertise, we are strengthening Hachette Livre’s strategic goals and further supporting the work carried out by our talented teams across the group. This alliance reinforces our commitment to storytelling in all its forms, ensuring our content resonates across every platform”.
Maxime Saada, CEO of CANAL+, remarked, “Great stories are at the heart of everything we do at CANAL+ and STUDIOCANAL. We are thus very happy to build this partnership with Hachette, one of the world’s leading publishing companies with an outstanding catalog. It marks an important step in our strategy to develop premium content from strong intellectual property. By working more closely upstream, we will be able to tell these stories in a different way and make them travel globally.”
