Korea's CJ E&M and Singapore's mm2 Ink a Slate Financing Partnership for S.E. Asia Films
Cannes France (May 10th, 2018) - South Korea’s largest content company CJ E&M will form a slate financing partnership for Southeast Asian films with Singapore’s leading media entertainment company mm2 Entertainment (“mm2”, a wholly owned subsidiary of mm2 Asia Ltd). For the next three years through to 2021, mm2 will finance six Southeast Asian films that CJ E&M finances and produces. Both mm2 and CJ E&M will also jointly devise a plan to expand their film businesses in Southeast Asia. Their slate deal covers 4 Thai films and 2 Indonesian films of which 3 will start production this year.
Two films will start shooting this summer – Kimo Stamboel’s (‘Headshot’ ‘Killers’) sci-fi Indonesian horror Dreadout: Tower of Hell in July, and CJ E&M’s Thai horror development project A Portrait of a Beauty. A Portrait of a Beauty has been selected for Focus Asia All Genres Project Market at the Far East Film Festival 2018. Additionally, the deal for Thai films extends to developing romance and horror films produced and distributed by CJ Major Entertainment – a joint venture between CJ E&M and Thailand-based Major Cineplex.
“The Southeast Asian film market is steadily growing thanks to Indonesia’s ascent in movie production, as high-quality genre movies are powering the growing,” said Jerry Ko, CJ E&M Head of International Division. “Through the slate deal with mm2, we will enhance networks in South East Asia and strive to bring the local film industry’s qualitative-quantitative growth.”
“We are proud to join forces with South Korea’s content market leader to co-produce originals and remakes across different genres, appealing to a wider international audience yet imbued with our distinctive Asian flavour. In this landmark partnership with CJ E&M, we hope to continue increasing our long-term investments in and expanding our network across the Southeast Asian film market,” said Ng Say Yong, Chief Content Officer of mm2 Entertainment.
Meanwhile, CJ E&M presented their vision for becoming a global production studio that produces 20 local films overseas in more than 10 languages by 2020, accelerating global production. On the other hand, mm2 is firming up plans to scale up its Chinese-language movie productions beyond the usual markets, experimenting with projects in Hollywood and other growing markets in Asia, such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and South Korea.
