The boom in series production in Germany has prompted a 50% hike in the annual budget for the German Motion Picture Fund (GMPF) which supports the production of high-end TV and VoD series and films, to €75m.
Claudia Roth, the new state minister for culture and media under nely-elected federal chancellor Olaf Scholz, announced the GMPF’s annual budget is set to rise from €50m to €75m as part of a proposed overall 10% increase in the federal government’s budget for arts and media for 2022.
Last year the fund’s budget had already been increased from €30m to €50m, but this injection of funding - which had been re-allocated from the under-subscribed DFFF II fund - had not been sufficient to meet growing demand from producers of high-end series for platforms and broadcasters.
By mid-2021, the funding pot of €50m had been paid out in non-repayable automatic grants to 19 series projects.
The largest single payment of €10m went to the Netflix series 1899 which was shot on the specially constructed Dark Bay virtual studio in the Marlene Dietrich Halle at Studio Babelsberg, followed by €6m for the fourth season of Babylon Berlin for Sky/ARD and €5.6m for W&B Television fantasy series The Gryphon commissioned by Amazon Prime.
The latest tally of GMPF-funded projects for the first two months of this year shows that €20m has already having been paid out to 12 projects.
UFA Fiction received over €8m in grants for three series - Robert Schwentke’s apocalyptic drama Helgoland 513 (Sky), Sam - Ein Sachse, based on true events surrounding the first black policeman in East Germany (Disney+), and the second season of ARD/WDR’s Unsere wunderbaren Jahre. X Filme Creative Pool was awarded €2.3m for the Paramount+ series The Sheikh (Der Scheich) to be directed by Dani Levy (The Kangaroo Chronicles) and Johannes Naber (Curveball).
Calls for changes
While the €25m hike will go some way to meeting the growing demand, Roth’s ministry also stated that it would “react flexibly” in tandem with the Federal Finance Ministry should more funding be required during the course of this year. There are still calls for changes to be made to GMPF’s regulations so that the scope of the grants would be internationally competitive.
Speaking in his capacity as a board member of the Association of Technical Operators for Film & TV (VTFF), Studio Babelsberg’s CEO Charlie Woebcken told Screen: “[the market for series production] is passing Germany by because we can only really attract smaller series because of the very low ‘caps’ for the GMPF fund. Those medium-sized or larger series only come to Germany if they have to because they need studios. The German funding system can’t keep pace with this market dynamic and ideally we need another €50m for the GMPF and a raising of the ‘cap’ - then we would be in a relatively more competitive position.”
According to the current GMPF guidelines, the grant can be up to 25% of the eligible German production costs for fiction series with German production costs of at least €24m and at least 70 points on the cultural test. The grant may not exceed €6m for fictional series with German production costs of up to €32m, €8m for series with German production costs up to €40m, or €10m for series with German production costs of more than €40m.
Woebcken also argued that changes should be made to the DFFF II fund which aims to support German production service-providers handling films with budgets over €20m and German production costs exceeding €8m.
“One of the funding criteria for receiving support from the DFFF II fund is that the project has to have a theatrical release in Germany,” he explained . “We think this is fundamentally questionable because such a requirement is unique worldwide. This is supposed to be funding for production service-providers who can’t have any influence on a cinema release. I think that the DFFF fund should really dispense with this requirement, at least as long as the cinemas are still not fully back in business.”
Last year only €42.4m in grants were paid out to seven projects, though the DFFF II fund has an annual budget of €75m at its disposal.
Lionsgate’s Keanu Reeves action film John Wick: Chapter 4 received the single largest grant - €19.8m - with other recipients including the Focus Features Cate Blanchett-led drama Tár, Bram Stoker adaptation The Last Voyage Of The Demeter, and the Liam Neeson action film Retribution as well as German VFX studios working for such US major productions as The Batman and Eternals.
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