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The drama series “So Long, Marianne” about legendary musician Leonard Cohen and his muse Marianne Ihlen has secured more distribution deals in Europe. The eight-part show tells the true story of Cohen and Ihlen’s passionate relationship in the 1960s. It centers around their time in the bohemian artist community on the Greek island of Hydra.

The series has already aired on television channels in Norway, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. Now it will reach more viewers with new partnerships. Distribution company Cineflix Rights arranged for the series to be shown on Czech TV, Estonia’s public broadcaster Err, Croatia’s Hrt, and Latvia’s Tet. These recent deals mean viewers in several Central and Eastern Europe countries can now watch the biopic.

Set against the sunny Mediterranean backdrop of Hydra, “So Long, Marianne” transports audiences to 1960s artist colony. There, Cohen and Ihlen’s relationship flourished among...

Exclusive: Leonard Cohen drama So Long, Marianne will play in a raft of new territories after Cineflix cut new distribution deals for the buzzy project, which played in competition at Series Mania.

The series tells the love story of Canadian singer and poet Leonard Cohen, and an extraordinary Norwegian woman, Marianne Ihlen who inspired the titular song. Alex Wolff (A Quiet Place: Day One) plays Cohen and Thea Sofie Loch Næss (The Last Kingdom) Marianne.

The majority of the project was filmed on the Greek island of Hydra where the pair lived in the 1960s. There, they joined legendary Australian novelists Charmian Clift (Anna Torv) and her husband George Johnston (Noah Taylor), and a bohemian group of writers, artists, poets. They were exploring a world of free love and artistic freedom, but also experiencing the rivalries that accompanied their interwoven lives.

Following premieres in Norway on Nrk, Canada on Crave,...

Cineflix Rights has closed several deals for “Irvine Welsh’s Crime,” starring Dougray Scott in his International Emmy award-winning lead role.

The series has been acquired by Telefonica’s pay TV platform Movistar Plus+ (Spain), Sbs (Australia), Rte (Ireland), Blue Entertainment (Switzerland), and Canal+ for viewers in Luxembourg, Hungary, Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Netherlands.

“Irvine Welsh’s Crime” was commissioned by Itvx and BritBox in the U.K.

The show follows Detective Inspector Ray Lennox (Scott), a man engaged in his own disturbing battle while undertaking serious crime investigations in a city on the edge of the abyss.

The series, adapted by “Trainspotting” author Welsh from his own novel, also stars John Simm, Joanna Vanderham, Angela Griffin, Ken Stott, and Jamie Sives.

Tim Mutimer, CEO of Cineflix Rights, said: “The combination of Irvine Welsh’s own adaptation of his best-selling novels, together with Dougray Scott’s powerful, award-winning performance has...

Ron Howard’s ‘Eden’ Makes Int’l Premiere As Opening Film Of Torino Film Fest

Rob Howard’s thriller Eden will make its international premiere as the opening film of Italy’s Torino Film Festival next month in the presence of the Oscar-winning director. The picture stars Jude Law, Ana De Armas, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Brühl and Sydney Sweeney as a group of people who flee 1920s Europe to start over and build paradise on the Galapagos Islands, with disastrous consequences. Italian rights for the film – which world premiered in Toronto – have been acquired by Italian International Film in collaboration with Rai Cinema, and 01 Distribution will handle the local theatrical release. The film was sold to Amazon Prime Video during Cannes in a multi-territory deal including the UK & Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France, Scandinavia, Spain, Latin America, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, India, Turkey, West Indies, and Asia pay-tv.

Alex Wolff slides into a plush chair at the Mandarin Oriental in New York’s Columbus Circle and orders a massive breakfast. By his own admission, he’s hungover, but he looks perfectly put together in that East Village kind of way. The Nickelodeon star-turned-“Pig” breakout is wearing a hoodie with the words “San Francisco” emblazoned across the front, the type a tourist might pick up at Fisherman’s Wharf, paired with Alex Crane pants. The previous night, he hit the premiere for “A Quiet Place: Day One”; the latest entry in the Paramount horror franchise finds Wolff playing a hospice nurse who convinces a terminal Lupita Nyong’o to trek into the city just as an alien invasion unfolds.

“I never really let loose at a premiere. I just get nervous,” he explains. “And then afterwards, I’ll go to some pub and get wasted.”

For the 26-year-old native New Yorker,...

Annette Bening’s first major TV series role has won the five-time Oscar nominee the Best Actress prize at this year’s Series Mania.

Bening was awarded in the past few minutes at the prestigious Lille event for her leading role in Peacock series Apples Never Fall, an adaptation of a novel by Big Little Lies scribe Liane Moriarty.

The coveted grand prize was given to French-Hungarian chess drama Rematch about the historic 1997 chess battle between Garry Kasparov and an Ibm computer. It beat off competition from the likes of Apples Never Fall, MGM+’s Hotel Cocaine and Leonard Cohen show So Long, Marianne.

Apples Never Fall stars Bening as Joy Delaney, a matriarch former tennis coach married to the irritable Stan (Neill), who suddenly goes missing, leaving her four children to piece together everything they thought they knew about their parents.

Speaking to Deadline prior to Series Mania, showrunner...

Good afternoon Insiders, Max Goldbart here. We’ve been out in force in France this week. To read about our travels, plus plenty more, scroll down, and sign up here.

All That Mania

‘So Long, Marianne’ star Alex Wolff (left) with Series Mania boss Laurence Herszberg

Netflix pulls ahead: Anything but doom and gloom this week at the Lille Series Mania confab, which was buzzy as ever, cementing its place as a must-not-miss event in the ever-crowded TV market calendar. Big stars including Patricia Arquette, Jeremy Irons and Michael Chiklis headed to the city in northern France to tout wares and talk shop. Netflix execs were out in full force, pushing hard against the cross-industry contraction narrative by unveiling dozens of shows in the weeks leading up to the market — and unveiling two more, starring Isabelle Adjani and Famke Janssen — at its showcase. At a time when local content is being rowed back,...

In the first few minutes of his first Zoom casting call with actor Alex Wolff, Oystein Karlsen knew he had found his Leonard Cohen.

“He came on the screen like this,” the Norwegian director and screenwriter puts his hand over his face, with one eye poking out. “He said: ‘Sorry, I’m so hung over. I know I’m not going to get the role. I feel horrible.’ I thought: That’s Leonard!”

Karlsen already had his eye on Wolff to play the famously melancholic Canadian singer-songwriter in his new TV miniseries about Cohen and Marianne Ihlen, his great love, muse and the woman who inspired the song that gives the series its title: So Long, Marianne.

Alex Wolff as Leonard Cohen and Thea Sofie Loch Ness as Marianne Ihlen in So Long, Marianne.

“I wanted a professional musician and singer because I wanted our Leonard to really sing, to really play Cohen’s music,...

Exclusive Narcos creator Chris Brancato is developing a Peaky Blinders-style series about Irish gangs in New York.

Brancato has revealed the project in the past few minutes at Series Mania, and it is under working title The Westies. Deadline understands the project is in early development for MGM+.

The showrunner, whose MGM+ show Hotel Cocaine is in competition in Lille, said he is working on the script and the series will be about “fearsome Irish gangs” with a starting point of the late 1970s.

Brancato talked the Series Mania crowd through his upcoming projects and said he is also mulling a couple of shows similar to Beverly Hills, 90210. He wrote on the series earlier in his career.

He is also sketching out a second season of Hotel Cocaine, a Casablance-esque show about a Cuban exile, and general manager of a hotel, the glamorous epicenter of the Miami cocaine scene...

Ancient Greek Aristotle got it right. The production whole is greater than the sum of its co-production parts. This was the sentiment at a Series Mania session titled ‘Fifty Shades of Co Pro’ on Tuesday.

Simone Emmelius, Zdf’s Senior VP international fiction – co-production and acquisition, laid it out: “You can only spend the Euro once, so you have the opportunity to maybe spend €200,000 [$218,000] on an episode, or you spend €200,000 on an episode that may cost €1.5 million. At the end of it, you get a production value of €1.5 million.” she explained. This encapsulates the essence of co-production, leveraging partnerships to attain a project that far exceeds what individual partners could do alone.

Three of Series Mania’s eight main international competition titles – “Apples Never Fall,” “Rematch,” “So Long, Marianne” — are co-productions. Some panel points of consensus:

Aligned Interests and Transparency

However, the foundation of a successful co-production lies in alignment,...

Creatives behind sperm donor series All & Eva have said the show represents a new wave of auteur-driven Scandi drama.

The era of The Killing and The Bridge dominating Scandi fare at events such as Series Mania is long gone, director Johanna Runevad and producer Sofie Palage told Deadline in the week leading up to All & Eva’s international competition screening at the Lille confab.

The pair pointed to hit Swedish dramedies that have aired of late including Viaplay’s Love Me and HBO Max’s Lust.

“Ten years ago, the only thing Sweden exported was crime shows and Nordic noir,” said Palage. “Now, the international audience is more likely to watch Swedish shows on other topics. You can do any genre and people will watch. Although I still love crime, it’s great that we don’t only have to do crime.”

For Runevad, this development has opened up a...

“’I sacrificed my love on the altars of fame,’ Leonard Cohen said in the ‘70s,” “So Long, Marianne” showrunner Øystein Karlsen notes. Cohen was referring of course to his ‘60s decade-long relationship with Norway’s Marianne Ilhen, which shaped him for life.

One of the highest-profile and most anticipated world premieres in Series Mania main competition, “So Long, Marianne” is a coming of age love story which, in a quietly innovative, genre-breaking turn, asks whether the place in the world chosen by one character, Leonard Cohen, was always for his good.

Sold by Cineflix Rights as an eight-part series, “So Long, Marianne” begins in 1959 focusing on Norway’s Marianne Ilhen and Cohen’s love idyll on Hydra, a Greek island, which Ilhen reaches as the partner of budding Norwegian novelist Axel Jensen, and Cohen looking to find a place where, he says in Episode 1, he “can take responsibility for my own identity.

Leonard Cohen had a huge impact on generations of fans, and So Long, Marianne star Alex Wolff is one of them.

Speaking exclusively to Deadline ahead of So Long‘s worldwide premiere at Series Mania this week, Oppenheimer and Hereditary actor Wolff paid tribute to the late singer-songwriter. “His contribution to my life has been so substantial that whatever words I have don’t sum up what he’s meant to my working life and to me personally,” he said.

Wolff, who is himself a musician and recording artist, plays Cohen in So Long, Marianne, which is one of the buzziest international series at Series Mania, which is Europe’s largest scripted television festival. The Nrk and Crave series is the International Competition category against the likes of Peacock’s Apples Never Fall and the ABC’s House of Gods.

In the eight-part series, Wolff appears opposite Thea Sofie Loch Næss...

Exclusive: Melanie Marnich is a huge fan of Big Little Lies scribe Liane Moriarty’s work, but when showrunning an adaptation of Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall, Marnich blocked the HBO hit from her consciousness almost entirely.

Peacock’s Apples Never Fall, which stars 2024 Oscar-nominee Annette Bening, launches tomorrow and is in international competition at next week’s Series Mania, was made with a Big Little Lies-free lens, Marnich explained to Deadline.

“I admire Big Little Lies and think it’s brilliant but I had to literally put it out my mind,” she said in the days leading up to the Lille market. “I knew I had to quite quickly ignore all [Moriarty’s past work] and ask what this book wants to be and what the best way is to honor it. How do I ignore all that came before to find the best voice and vision for this translation?”

Exec produced...

Is this now an age of TV caution? A brace of big swings at this week’s London TV Screenings belie that trend, and few come bigger than the English-language action thriller “Paris Has Fallen,” which Studiocanal launches at this week’s London TV Screenings.

Like other major Ltvs plays, it takes a mainstream genre – such as, elsewhere, the historical drama (“Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light”), true crime (“A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story”) and the bio – and aims to elevate them to another level.

This is Studiocanal’s biggest TV production of 2024. “‘Paris Has Fallen’ has ambition, scale and production values that I haven’t see in so many series,” says Anne Chérel, EVP global sales and distribution at Studiocanal.

Such scale comes with its backers. Produced by London-based Studiocanal production company Urban Myth Films (“War of the Worlds”), Studiocanal and Millennium and Butler’s G-Base,...

Picking up on Berlinale Series Market hits, such as “Lost Boys & Fairies,” and teasing some of the big main competition swings at Series Mania – “Apples Never Fall,” “Rematch,” “So Long, Marianne” – the 2024 London TV Screenings are a powerhouse showcase of some of the biggest TV highlights of 2024, plus the trends shaping TV markets.

To help you cut through the slates, here’s Variety’s picks of 20 shows that will whet buyers’ appetites.

“Apples Never Fall” (NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution)

One highlight for NBCU, hosting the first London TV Screenings showcase on Monday Feb. 26 evening, is “The Day of the Jackal,” starring Eddie Redmayne, produced by “Top Boy” showrunner Ronan Bennett and directed by Brian Kirk (“Game of Thrones”). Highest profile, however – given its cast and now status as the biggest swing in Series Mania main competition – may be Peacock limited series “Apples Never Fall,” with Annette Bening as the...

Such has been the chaos in international TV over the past 12 months that you could argue Cineflix Rights’ Head of Scripted, James Durie, is underplaying things when he says it has been “a hell of a year.”

Distributors around the world have watched on in horror as the streaming sector crumbled and the crashing TV ad market decimated budgets at commercial nets everywhere, not to mention the license fee woes being experienced by the likes of the BBC. Redundancies, cost saving and restructuring took hold, and the likes of Paramount, Disney+ and Prime Video have cut back on international originals, in some cases brutally culling non-u.S. shows.

In recent months, international scripted projects from countries such as the UK, Canada and Australia that would have been viable options for the U.S. streamers have suddenly been seen as big gambles. The sense that co-production agreements with streamers could be struck faded into dust,...

Lille-based Series Mania, Europe’s biggest TV festival and forum, has revealed its impressive 2024 main competition, which includes three U.S. streamer bows – from Peacock, and MGM+ and Disney+/HBO Europe world premieres.

The starry lineup features, for example, the much-anticipated new Liane Moriarty adaptation “Apples Never Fall” with Annette Bening as the matriarch who suddenly disappears, leaving her picture-perfect family in disarray. Currently celebrating Oscar nomination for “Nyad,” Bening is joined in the series be by Sam Neill and Alison Brie.

Alex Wolff, recently spotted in another Oscar hopeful “Oppenheimer,” will put on his deepest voice for “So Long, Marianne” about the tumultuous relationship between Leonard Cohen and Norwegian writer Marianne Ihlen, from Norway’s Nrk.

With Wolff currently set to attend, Zal Batmanglij – behind Netflix’s “The Oa” – “The Artist’s” Bérénice Bejo, “Gossip Girl” alumni Kelly Rutherford, novelist Douglas Kennedy and France’s Laurent Lafitte will also deliver masterclasses.

Exclusive: The creator of Canadian smash Letterkenny has struck a multi-year content deal with streamer Crave and New Metric Media that Crave’s programing boss says is a first of its kind.

With Letterkenny’s 12th and final season dropping on Boxing Day, Jared Keeso will subsequently make 49 episodes of Letterkenny spin-offs including Shoresy and other potential shows across several years.

Unveiling the news to Deadline, Crave VP Content Development & Programming Justin Stockman said “this is probably the only deal that has ever been done like this in Canada.” The deal does not prevent Keeso from making shows for other platforms, eschewing the golden handcuffs approach taken by some of the major Hollywood players.

“There is not a lot of pre-committing in Canadian content so this is pretty unique but shows our belief in Jared and the show, and in other shows that don’t exist yet,” added Stockman. “This...

Cineflix’s Rights’ Leonard Cohen series starring Alex Wolff as the iconic singer-songwriter has revealed presales in the U.K., Greece and Cyprus, with Ard’s Fabfiction in Germany joining as a co-producer.

Titled “So Long, Marianne,” the drama has sold to Itvx in the U.K., Cosmote TV and Star Channel in Greece and Movies Best HD in Cyprus. Ard’s Fabfiction has joined original co-producers Nrk in Norway and Bell Media’s Crave in Canada.

According to its official description, the series “tells the legendary love story of Canadian singer and poet Leonard Cohen, and his muse Marianne Ihlen who inspired the titular song. It’s an intimate tale of two lonely people falling in love during a period of their life when they are trying to figure out who they are and their place in the world, while one is becoming one of the most famous singers of all time.

Exclusive: Black Bear’s management arm has signed the Swedish actor and model Simon Lööf for representation.

Lööf is currently on set in the lead role of Netflix’s Swedish thriller An Honest Life, directed by Mikael Marcimain, which is due to be released globally 2024.

Based on a thriller by Joakim Zander of the same name, the buzzed about production revolves around a disillusioned law school student who finds himself on the wrong side of the law, when he falls under the thrall of an anarchic, young woman he meets a political demonstration.

Simon Lööf made his acting debut in 2020 in teen ice hockey drama Eagles, which he followed with a co-starring role in the critically acclaimed Swedish series Threesome opposite Matilda Källström.

Aside from An Honest Life, Lööf’s will soon be seen in the series So Long, Marianne about the relationship between...

Cineflix Media, a leading independent producer and distributor, is expanding its operations by opening a Vancouver branch of Cineflix Studios run by industry veteran Mark Miller.

The Vancouver office will “focus on producing and co-producing scripted series, movies, and factual content for North American and international streamers and broadcasters,” according to a press release. Miller will serve as president and report to Cineflix Media co-founder and CEO Glen Salzman.

Over the past few years, Cineflix Media has built up its production business in North America and Europe, which encompasses Cineflix Studios (“Tehran”) and Cineflix Productions. The company also has joint ventures with C3 Media and Buccaneer (“The Burning Girls”) as well as a creative partnership with December Films (“Reginald the Vampire”).

Miller most recently served in a dual role as president of Thunderbird Entertainment Group and CEO of Great Pacific Media, where he executive produced shows like “Kim’s Convenience” for CBC and Netflix.

Alex Wolff will play Leonard Cohen in a new series about the Canadian icon and his muse Marianne Ihlen.

Thea Sofie Loch Næss will portray Ihlen in the show, which is called “So Long, Marianne” — the title of one of Cohen’s songs about his partner. Other cast members include Anna Torv as Charmian Clift and Noah Taylor as George Johnston.

The show is a co-production between Norwegian broadcaster Nrk and Canada’s Crave, the streaming service owned by Bell Media. Cineflix Rights is distributing the series globally.

Principal photography on the show began on March 24, with shooting taking place on the Greek island of Hydra — where Cohen first met Ihlen — as well as Ihlen’s home country of Norway, and the late singer’s hometown of Montreal, Canada.

“So Long, Marianne” is billed as an “intimate tale of two, lonely people falling in love, during a period of their...

Alex Wolff has been cast as legendary singer Leonard Cohen in So Long, Marianne, the Nrk drama series we first revealed last year.

Thea Sofie Loch Næss will play Canadian musician Cohen’s muse Marianne Ihlen. Anna Torv has also been cast Charmian Clift and Noah Taylor is George Johnston.

Wolff appeared opposite Joachim Phoenix in indie flick Pig and has been cast in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Before that, he reteams with Pig filmmaker Michael Sarnoski on Paramount Pictures’ A Quiet Place: Day One alongside Lupita Nyong’o in 2024.

In further developments, Canadian streamer Crave has boarded So Long, Marianne, which began principal photography on March 24 and is shooting in multiple locations including the Greek island of Hydra, Oslo in Norway,...