The Candyman rights notice nobody has reported

Hollywood Signal is back, and it’s a different thing from before. Every Friday from now on you get the best optionable true stories we found that week, each with the rights route, and a section from Hollywood Wizard, our system for tracking what buyers say they want.

This week: Netflix’s new management in its own words, and what Disney+, Amazon and Neon have told sellers in the past fortnight. Then seven things you could option, starting with a Copyright Office notice on the story behind Candyman that took effect on Tuesday, a Delon-era Paris murder just out in the US, Belgium’s most famous detective caught with 11 tonnes of cocaine at 76, and the book that has just won the Goncourt. At the bottom, three deals that tell you something and one number.

Here’s the latest from Hollywood Wizard, our system that scans hundreds of sources every week for signs of what buyers actually want: earnings calls, trade interviews, festival panels, press releases, hiring notices and the occasional LinkedIn post an executive wishes they’d thought twice about. It keeps every stated mandate, who said it, when, and what they were buying at the time. If you’d like to know more about it, write to me at bradley@projectbrazen.com. Six things from the past three weeks worth your time, biggest buyer first.

Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-CEO, on the third-quarter earnings call, 20 October, five days after Bela Bajaria was pushed out and Peter Rice named chief content officer. Rice started on 26 October and hasn’t said anything in public yet beyond the appointment release, but you can read the brief from around him. Sarandos says the strategy doesn’t change and the US has to execute better. Rice’s first memo to staff, per Variety, talked about buzzy hits for the US and Canada. And the US scripted team was reorganised the same day into pods with written targets: Cole Galvin’s drama, thriller and YA group is after female-skewing co-viewing (relationship dramas, propulsive mysteries, romance); Michael Azzolino’s genre, action and crime group is after male-skewing co-viewing (action, sci-fi, world-building, horror, Westerns, spy, crime); comedy is split between a commercial lane and an auteur lane. The film job is open after Dan Lin was fired, and that hire is Rice’s first big call. So for the next few months the thing Netflix US wants is a big American swing that plays in Seoul and São Paulo, and the pods tell you which door to knock on. Everything else is noise until the film chief is named.

Karl Holmes, general manager EMEA, Disney+, to Screen International, 27 October, the day Disney+ signed to carry Channel 4’s shows. Three times the volume means three times the slots. The part that matters if you have a British or European project is the second half: Disney+ says it will fund first-run series alongside the broadcaster, so a Channel 4 or ARD commission can now come with Disney money attached. Producers who’ve only ever pitched the broadcaster have a second buyer in the room, and Holmes says 40 per cent of his audience is 16 to 34, which tells you what he’ll pay up for.

Buddy Marini, head of Amazon MGM Studios Japan, to Screen International, 28 October. Amazon is doubling its spend on Japanese originals and says it’s actively adapting manga, light novels and older properties for live action and anime, and that “you really have to spend the money to satisfy that global audience.” Netflix has had this lane largely to itself for years. If you hold Japanese rights, or a property Japan would want, there are now two bidders where there was one, and the second one has just said it’s in a hurry. Amazon’s job boards back it up: it’s hiring a senior creative executive for Japanese scripted series and a head of programming strategy in Tokyo with anime in the remit.

Jeff Deutchman, head of acquisitions, production and development at Neon, to Screen International, 29 October. He also said Neon spends on foreign-language films the way it spends on English-language ones, and that what he needs is a reason to put a film in a cinema: spectacle, quality, originality or representation. Most sellers pitch Neon the thing that resembles its last hit. He’s telling you that’s the one pitch he won’t take, and that a foreign-language film with one of those four qualities gets a real release, not a token one.

Michael Wright, global head of MGM+, in the greenlight announcement, 26 October. The Black Tapes was a fiction podcast from 2015. The quote is press-release language, but the decision under it isn’t: MGM+ has put money on a podcast as the source, and on supernatural horror told straight. If you have an audio series with a built audience and a creepy premise, MGM+ has just told you it’s a buyer. The Missing Boys, below, is a true story rather than fiction, but it sits in the same door.

Pauline Dauvin, VP content, Netflix France, writing on LinkedIn on 26 October after the platform’s first French upfront. The Ankler reported last week that under Rice the international teams still greenlight their own slates and the top brass “create the mood music more than actually greenlighting shows”, so Dauvin’s money is Dauvin’s to spend. Two of this week’s Board items are French true stories with their screen rights open, and Netflix France is the first name I’d put against both.

Everything Hollywood Wizard holds, searchable by buyer, genre, format and territory, is coming to subscribers. Reply if you want to be first in.

Seven things a buyer could option this week. The lead first, then the rest in rough order of how fast I’d move.

01  ·  The lead

Candyman’s creator wants to take it home to Liverpool

Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden” became Bernard Rose’s Candyman in 1992, with the setting moved from a Liverpool council estate to Chicago’s Cabrini-Green. Barker told Dread Central last month he still wishes he’d made his own: “I would love to do a film set in my native city,” closer to the short story, “since it is a story from the world from which I came.”

On Tuesday that got more interesting. A notice of termination recorded with the US Copyright Office in November 2020 names Barker as the author ending a grant of rights in “The Forbidden”, names Candyman Films Inc., Candyman Films LLC and TriStar Pictures as grantees, and gives 3 November 2026 as the effective date (US Copyright Office recorded documents, V9976 D221). Nobody in the trades has reported it. Barker has done this before: he recaptured the US rights to Hellraiser under a consent judgment that took effect in December 2021.

The caveats are real. We haven’t seen the notice itself or any later agreement that might change it; the films made under the old grant can go on being sold (Copyright Office on termination); it’s a US filing; and Candyman’s chain of title has been messy before. But the shape of it is a horror name with a franchise behind him, on record wanting a Liverpool version, as a grant on the source story ends. A Liverpool Candyman would be a new work from the story, not a remake. Prime Video UK’s Tara Erer said in September she wants shows that are “unmistakably British, specific”, citing Clarkson’s Farm and Ludwig as the ones that travelled because they were so British; MGM+ just greenlit supernatural horror told straight (see the Wizard above); Netflix’s new genre pod lists horror and world-building in its brief.

02  ·  Worth chasing

Alain Delon, a dead bodyguard and the scandal that shook de Gaulle’s France

In the autumn of 1968 a young Yugoslav called Stevan Markovic, Alain Delon’s former bodyguard and sometime stand-in, was found dead outside Paris, shot in the head, wrapped in plastic, wearing the actor’s clothes. The police questioned Delon while he was filming La Piscine, playing a man being questioned by police about a suspicious death. His friend François Marcantoni, a Corsican gangster, spent a year in prison on the charge and walked. The rumours that followed reached as far as the wife of a prime minister. Nobody was ever convicted. Chisholm told RFI it’s the first time the whole thing has been written up properly in English, and “clearly Marcantoni did it.”

It’s a star at his peak, a murder, the Corsican mob and the top of French politics in one story, and Delon, who died in 2024, is a name every buyer in Europe knows. Chisholm says he wrote it cinematically and that on adaptation “people are interested... we’ll see”, which in April meant nothing was signed. The UK edition made the Baillie Gifford Prize longlist; the US edition came out on Tuesday. His first book, A Waiter in Paris, was a cult hit, so there’s a readership already. Netflix France has just said it’s spending more than €300m a year on French stories that travel; ITV’s Darren Nartey said in October he’s buying star-led crime drama with a strong sense of place. Paris in 1968 with Delon at the centre fits both briefs.

03  ·  Worth chasing

The eight women who made Nuremberg and were written out of it

James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, with Russell Crowe as Göring, came out last year and, as Livingstone wrote in JTA last week, it’s a trial with no women in it. Her book has eight. Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, the resistance deportee who survived Auschwitz and on 28 January 1946 became the first woman to testify. Harriet Zetterberg, the Yale-trained American lawyer who built the case against Hans Frank and wasn’t allowed to speak in court, so a man read her pages. Erika Mann, covering her own country’s trial. And Countess Ingeborg Kálnoky, who ran the witnesses’ guest house, where victims and perpetrators slept in adjoining rooms and ate at the same table, and kept a diary.

The guest house is where I’d start a series: eight women, one city, a year, and a reason for everyone in the story to pass on the stairs. The 80th anniversary of the verdicts was last month. BBC Studios’ Sharifa Mansour told C21 book adaptations are the hot area for its scripted labels; Netflix UK’s unscripted team was asking at Edinburgh for documentary with extraordinary archive, which Nuremberg has by the mile.

04  ·  Worth chasing

Belgium’s most famous detective, caught importing cocaine at 76

Willy Van Mechelen solved the Bracht kidnapping in 1978 and was, for a generation, Belgium’s top cop. He also kept a card index of every criminal in Antwerp, got done for running marijuana through the port in the nineties, went on the run for eight years, got caught at 70 carrying €326,000 for a cartel laundering gang, and then, at 76, turned up in an Audi outside a Dutch warehouse where a container of Costa Rican timber had just arrived with 2,792 kilos of cocaine under the wood. The Atavist’s piece follows Operation Costa from there: a 5.6-tonne load inside an iron cube that scanners couldn’t read, his EncroChat handle (“vividcat”), and the dawn raid in September 2020 that took 29 people and seized a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a yacht, horses and €320,000 hidden in the counterweights of his neighbour’s garage doors. The final shipment, 11.5 tonnes, is the biggest bust in Belgian history. He was sentenced to nine years in July, aged 82, after standing up in court, crying and asking not to die in prison. He’s appealing from a care home.

The writers spent two years on it and met him once, at his lawyer’s office, where he thumped his chest and promised “the real truth”. The interview never happened. Antwerp is Europe’s main door for cocaine, and this is that story with a famous cop in the middle. Darren Nartey at ITV is buying crime with a sense of place and pre-buying co-productions; Disney+ EMEA has just said it’s partnering with European broadcasters wherever it can (Wizard, above). A Flemish-language series with an English-speaking buyer attached is the obvious shape.

05  ·  Worth chasing

A Montparnasse model, murdered in 1949, and the Goncourt winner who solved it

On the night of 6 September 1949 a sub-prefect driving along the quai de Javel found the body of a young woman, strangled, redressed in a hurry with her jumper on back to front. She was Louise Cansot, 29, once the most sought-after painters’ model in Montparnasse, fallen on hard times, mother of a four-year-old. Four suspects: the lukewarm lover, a colonel with a reputation to protect, a furniture dealer, an aristocrat who liked parties. The inspector closed the file after six months. Jaenada, who has made a career of reopening French criminal files (La Serpe won the Femina), went back to the archive, walked every location, and names the killer on the last page (Flammarion; La Tribune Dimanche).

It won the Goncourt on Tuesday, in the first round, by six votes to three over Sylvain Prudhomme (Le Figaro). It was already a bestseller since the rentrée, and a Goncourt winner has averaged 577,000 copies in France (Challenges, citing GfK). Translations usually follow the prize; screen rights are a separate negotiation, and the price went up with the prize. English-language buyers still mostly haven’t heard of it. Netflix France’s Dauvin wants French stories that travel; France Télévisions’ Anne Holmes has said the miniseries is now her reference format. No English translation announced yet, so for now this is one for people who read French or have a scout who does.

06  ·  Worth chasing

Two Ontario boys lost to the drug trade

Mark Kelley’s series follows two Black teenagers from Ontario who were lured hundreds of kilometres from home and vanished into the drug trade, built on the fifth estate‘s “Missing Black Boys” investigation (CBC Media Centre). All four episodes are out, the last on Thursday. The reporting is done, and US buyers almost never look at CBC’s audio slate. MGM+ has just greenlit a podcast as source material (Wizard, above); Crave’s Sean Cohan told The Ankler he’s taking “worthy risks”; Amazon MGM’s Brent Haynes is buying crime and mystery for English Canada. These are teenagers and their families, so nothing should move without them.

07  ·  Back on the Board

Back on the Board: the time-travel classic that never got made

Plenty of people in development have read it and nobody has filmed it. Lionsgate announced an option in 2012 with Doug Liman directing and nothing came of it. A notice recorded with the Copyright Office in October 2019 by Finney’s heirs names Universal City Studios and Universal Television as grantees and took effect on 1 June this year; a second, naming the producers of the stage musical, takes effect on 1 May 2027 (US Copyright Office recorded documents, V9968 D167 and V9968 D146). Whether the 2012 option ran through Universal or still stands, I don’t know, so I’m calling the rights position conflicting until someone at the estate’s agency says otherwise. Paramount under Goldberg and Greenstein has made novel adaptations a priority; Peacock’s Lisa Katz told Deadline audiences turn up for mystery and suspense “with a relatable theme”. A man goes back to 1882 New York, falls in love and has to decide which century to live in: a mystery, a romance and a two-hander for co-viewing.

If I were chasing one thing this week it would be Candyman, because the notice has taken effect and nobody else has it. Then Chisholm, because the US edition is now out and I’d want the English-language version bought before a French producer gets there. Then the Supercop, which is the best story on the page and the hardest to set up. Then Jaenada, now a Goncourt winner, while the English-language rights are still open. Time and Again is for whoever has the patience to clear the title.

Three deals from the fortnight, and a number.

Which of these would you chase first, and what have we missed? Reply to this email; we read every answer.

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