A lot was riding on the meeting at JP Morgan. It was March 2015, and Pierre-Antoine Capton needed to convince a room filled with 40 bankers and lawyers that they should back Mediawan, a French company he believed could one day be Europe’s answer to the Hollywood conglomerates. Capton, a successful television producer, had been enlisted by telecom billionaire Xavier Niel and banker Matthieu Pigasse to raise $300 million for the new venture, despite the fact that he had no background in finance. For Niel and Pigasse, the idea was simple: raise capital through an IPO, make one major acquisition, cash out and move on. But Capton had different plans.
When asked by the moneymen about his strategy, Capton said, in French, “My strategy for what? It’s for you to explain to me what I’m supposed to do.” Then he added, “Also, I wanted to tell you that I don’t speak English.”
“They all looked down at their shoes,” Capton says, laughing. Today he’s sitting in his office in the 7th arrondissement, the Eiffel Tower framed in the window behind him, an English grammar textbook on the marble table in front of him. “They were looking for someone who could seduce investors in the United States, and I didn’t know anything about finance. We went for it anyway.”
Capton can afford to laugh now — earlier this year, he pulled off one of the biggest M&A deals of the year, acquiring Peter Chernin’s North Road Company, a top Netflix supplier and the producer of the streamer’s most popular reality hit, “Love Is Blind.”
In recent years, Mediawan has been on a spree, buying stakes in Brad Pitt’s Plan B and “Slow Horses” producer See-Saw Films. The company has launched an international venture with Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap and partnered with LeBron James’ SpringHill and Florian Zeller’s Blue Morning Pictures. Just over a decade since the meeting with JP Morgan, Mediawan boasts an annual revenue of roughly $2.3 billion and has investments in nearly 100 production companies across 15 countries, including France’s top two production banners, Chapter 2 and Chi-Fou-Mi. All told, Mediawan’s films grossed $1 billion at the worldwide box office last year and the company controls blockbuster IP like “Call My Agent!” and the animated franchise “Miraculous.”
And Capton’s not done. He thinks that Mediawan has an opportunity to consolidate companies in its part of the world into an entertainment leviathan not unlike what David Ellison is attempting to build with Warner Bros. and Paramount. “There will be two giants in Europe and maybe two independent giants in the U.S. My ambition pushes me to want to be the biggest and to become one of the future consolidators,” he says.
Capton was inspired to build Mediawan out of professional frustration. While he was working as an independent producer, he partnered with Zeller, then a French playwright whose searing family dramas “The Son” and “The Father” were performed to great success on stages all over the world. But when it came time for “The Father” to make the leap to the big screen, Zeller struggled to find financing. “France is good at luxury, good at fashion, but we are also a country of extraordinary creative talent, and we should be helping them reach the world,” Capton says.
Capton felt that a company like Mediawan could serve as a bridge between Hollywood and Europe, helping talent on both sides of the Atlantic access capital. The timing was right: Blockbuster U.S. films have long been embraced around the world, but increasingly mass audiences are ignoring language barriers and watching shows and movies from other countries. That’s turned everything from “Squid Game” to “Call My Agent!” into global phenoms.
North Road’s Chernin says he was drawn to Mediawan for its entrepreneurial culture and global ambition. “Pierre-Antoine is a genuinely creative person,” Chernin says. “He watches things; he reads things; he cares about them. Most people are either creative or entrepreneurial. Very few can do both. The fact that he can do both, at least half the time in a different language, makes him remarkable.”
Capton, who wears glasses and has slicked back, salt-and-pepper hair, is surprisingly down-to-earth for a media mogul who counts George Clooney and Emmanuel Macron as friends. He was born into a middle-class family in Normandy, his father, a driving instructor, his mother, the owner of a hair salon. They worked long hours, and Capton says he was partly raised by his grandmother. “We’d watch American sitcoms and all sorts of shows,” he says. “I traveled to other places thanks to documentaries. I educated myself with television.” No program left a bigger impact on Capton in the mid-’90s than “Friends.” He says he was in love with Jennifer Aniston and couldn’t wait to watch the next episode every week. It made him think about one day joining the entertainment business as one of the power brokers making things run.
But first he needed his big break. Capton moved to Paris straight out of high school and joined Groupe AB followed by the flagship channel Canal+ as an intern. After he came up with the idea of programming a full season of “Friends” in a 24-episode bloc, Canal+ hired him. But when the company went through major restructuring a couple years later, Capton took a severance package of 50,000 francs and used it to launch Troisième Oeil Productions (now part of Mediawan). Troisième Oeil produced the show “Starmag,” which ran for 10 years. It’s now behind some of France’s top-rated primetime talk shows, including “C à Vous,” which airs on the French public broadcaster France Télévisions and features movie stars, politicians and other prominent figures.
Niel recalls that bringing Capton into Mediawan was almost instinctive. He had charisma, a reputation for relentless energy, a sharp eye for talent and a track record of producing well-loved shows and documentaries. “Pierre-Antoine is the kind of guy who always comes to you with ideas, saying, ‘We could do something fun together.’ Calling him for Mediawan felt natural,” Niel says.
From the beginning, Mediawan’s founders stood apart from traditional corporate players. Niel is a self-made billionaire who disrupted France’s telecom scene with his company, the internet service provider Free, and investments in tech startups. Pigasse owns left-leaning media outlets including Le Monde.
Capton’s initial deals drew skepticism from the industry. When Mediawan’s first big acquisition was Groupe AB — a library of 1980s sitcoms — the industry scoffed. “People thought we had raised all that money to buy something unsexy,” Capton says.
When Mediawan acquired Mon Voisin Productions, the company behind “Call My Agent!,” “people said it had only one show.” Yet that program became one of Netflix’s biggest French-language hits, and is being expanded into a film that will include cameos from Clooney and Eva Longoria. A U.S. spinoff is in development at HBO, with Plan B and SpringHill producing.
When Mediawan bought Plan B in December 2022 in a deal valued at approximately $300 million, Capton heard the same doubts. “People said we’d paid too much for a company that’s past their prime,” Capton says. “And last year, they delivered ‘Adolescence’ and ‘F1.’”
Brad Pitt on the set of Apple’s “F1”
Courtesy of Apple
Elisabeth d’Arvieu, CEO of Mediawan Pictures, who has worked closely with Capton, calls the Plan B deal a turning point. “Until that partnership, we were still essentially perceived as a French group with a footprint across Europe, and therefore virtually unknown in the United States,” she says. “Suddenly, with Plan B, people saw us as a major European studio.”
The acquisition also helped Mediawan draw other prestige producers, notably Lorenzo Mieli (“Challengers”) and Mario Gianani (“My Brilliant Friend”), who stepped down from Fremantle and partnered with Mediawan in 2024 to launch Our Films, which will be in Cannes with Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Fatherland” — one of the six movies that Mediawan will have at Cannes.
But the acquisitions are only half the story. What makes Mediawan’s model different is how these deals are structured and financed. The key mechanism is that sellers are paid partly in Mediawan shares. As such, Plan B’s Pitt, Jeremy Kleiner and Dede Gardner, North Road’s Chernin and See-Saw Films’ Iain Canning and Emile Sherman are all now Mediawan stakeholders. “We didn’t buy Plan B outright,” says Niel. “We became partners with Jeremy, Dede and Brad. We didn’t buy Margot Robbie — we became partners with Margot Robbie. We didn’t buy North Road — we became partners with Peter Chernin.”
For Gardner and Kleiner, the appeal in being part of Mediawan lies in this balance between independence and support. “They embrace independence while strengthening what we do,” Kleiner says. Gardner adds, “That mix is very hard to achieve. You’re connected to people working in different languages, different systems, different ways of thinking.” Over at See-Saw Films, Iain Canning and Emile Sherman echo the sentiment. “They are cleverly backing our autonomy and agency and at the same time very much supporting our ambitions with finance, IP, sales, and relationships,” says Canning. “Only a year in, there are already very real format, ancillary and co-production opportunities that are playing out.” So far, Mediawan hasn’t lost a single major label across its portfolio. CFO Guillaume Izabel argues the most important factors in that retention rate are “intangible.” It’s “what Pierre-Antoine embodies and the relationships he’s built, because he’s a producer himself.”
Despite its increasing global influence, Mediawan faces the same seemingly insurmountable issue as other production companies do: It doesn’t actually own what it makes in the U.S. Instead, it gets a fee for producing its work from the streamers and studios who buy its pitches. “That’s the Hollywood model. We’re not going to change that; the rights stay with the studios,” Capton says. “But at the same time, we earn a percentage of the profits on all transactions.”
Capton hints that Mediawan is exploring different ways to bring its shows and films to audiences in the U.S., possibly by distributing the content itself. “If we want to have more rights, we need to become a studio,” he says. “That’s part of the discussions we’re having right now.”
Europe is more favorable for independent producers when it comes to rights ownership. French regulation requires platforms to split rights with producers, who get ownership of their IP back after a three-year licensing period. Plan B Europe and LuckyChap International was formed for this very reason. “Getting films and shows financed directly from American commissioners is a big part of our business, but having other mechanisms for getting stories made and achieved through the U.K., France, Spain, Italy — given that conditions for making things in those places are potentially more favorable to producers — that was appealing,” says Kleiner.
“In the U.S., you can make more money up front selling to platforms, but you don’t own your IP. In Europe, you make less up front, but you own it,” says Chernin. “The question is: Do you want short-term money or long-term value?”
Capton’s expanding role as a connector between France and the global entertainment industry has become a strategic asset in its own right. He has developed a close relationship with Macron since producing a documentary on his presidential campaign in 2017. “He is someone for whom I have a lot of respect, and to whom the French creative system owes a lot,” says Capton, who recently accompanied the president on a state visit to Japan and South Korea, where he met with Oscar-winning “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho.
Capton already has a large network in Hollywood as well. Ellison, Paramount chairman and the likely future owner of Warner Bros. Discovery, calls him “a true champion of the creative community — someone who backs talent and storytelling with real conviction.”
Capton’s role as an ambassador between Hollywood and Europe extends to doing personal favors. When Clooney wanted French citizenship for himself and his family, Capton helped. “I try to build a bridge between two worlds,” he says.
Capton has just returned from a six-week sprint through L.A., Mexico, Seoul, Japan and London — meeting with partners, filmmakers, and studio heads along the way. He’s buzzing with ideas about collaborations and deals he wants to sign.
“I don’t do things for money — that’s not what guides me,” Capton says. “I love content, and I want to make more of it. If I manage to keep going with the same drive, we’re going to win in the end.”
Source:
variety.com
