Paramount+ focusing on international projects for growth

Paramount+ will be bowing “Drag Race Italia” Season 3 on the streaming service in Italy, followed by the U.S. and Latin America later this year.

The Italian Season 3 follows on the recent announcement of three new “Drag Race” editions in Brazil, Germany and Mexico and a “Global Drag Race All Stars,” which will air on Paramount+ in their respective territories this year, Paramount+ announced Wednesday.

“As we expand Paramount+’s global footprint, it was important to recapture ‘Drag Race’ in key international markets and also build an interconnected competition series with a new ‘Global Drag Race All Stars’ – it’s like a global Super Bowl for Drag,” said Chris McCarthy, president-CEO, Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios & Paramount Media Networks.

The news came minutes before Marco Nobili, Paramount+ EVP and international general manager for Paramount took to the stage at France’s Series Mania in Lille for a fireside chat to talk an industry audience through Paramount+’s roadmap on a path to profitability which takes in harnessing the power of its huge IPs, further geographical expansion, scaling and franchises.

Few shows illustrate better Paramount+’s arsenal of big titles than “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” which, produced by MTV Entertainment Studios and World of Wonder, has won 27 Emmy Awards.

It also illustrates Paramount+’s major challenges. In terms of big shows – many screened at the beginning of the Wednesday fireside chat – Paramount has some of the weightiest on earth. Nobili himself cites “Top Gun,” “Babylon,” and “The Lost City” among blockbusters and, among scripts shows, the Taylor Sheridan universe of series kicked off by “Yellowstone,” plus “Paw Patrol,” “Yellowjackets,” “Star Trek,” “South Park” and “Wolf Pack.”

Paramount+ saw a bullish last quarter 2022 adding a record 9.9 million subscribers and growing revenue 81% year-on-year.

“It’s a recipe and the recipe works,” Nobili said at Series Mania.

Yet Paramount+ came relatively late to the global streaming game, launching just two years ago in March 2021. It reached 45 countries in global roll-out last year and has 56 million subscribers but needs to grow all the more after reporting a $1.8 billion loss on its DTC segment on Feb. 16.

“2023 is more of a year of scale,” Nobili told Variety just before his fireside chat. “Getting scale in the streaming business is key,” Nobili said on stage.

“So how do we get to scale? And how do we continue to grow within the market, we already have a footprint?” he asked.

Some market offer large opportunities, said Nobili. The U.K., Germany and France “have a lot of scale, a lot of opportunity there, are very big markets in both volume and output, which is critically important for us,” Nobili said. “The bigger the scale the more your revenues and the more you can invest in infrastructure,” he added.

Another answer to scale is to enhance customer choice, Nobili argued, citing Paramount+’s first ever mobile-only subscription plan, announced last week and beginning in April in Mexico and Brazil.

“Anther component that we’re going to continue to look at are opportunities to potentially increase our geographical coverage in the world’s top 10 markets from a streaming standpoint, particularly from that of SVOD,” Nobili told Variety. A launch in India, where Paramount has a partnership with the Reliance Group, is planned for later this year.

Paramount streaming content spend could come in at less than $6 billion in 2024, Paramount CFO Naveen Chopra said late February.

“It’s less about who spends the most, it’s more about who spends in the most intelligent way and in the most capable way to actually attract audiences,” argued Nobili.

“So having these big mass franchises that are really becoming popular is something that is critical for us, we know how to create popular content the same way as we know how to make content popular. You will hear us saying that over and over again,” he added.

Paramount has been expanding franchises, Nobili said at Series Mania, citing “Dexter,” “Yellowstone.” “Building franchises doesn’t mean taking away originality. If you do a sequel of a show, audiences go down, but a prequel amps up the franchise. You can watch the prequel without having seen the original. That requires originality,” Nobili said.

“You’ll have to take big swings, globally and locally,” Nobili said, citing “Rabbit Hole,” with Keifer Sutherland.

“And you can do that locally, with scripted and unscripted,” he continued giving as one example “Los Enviados,” which launched just over one year ago majorly for the Latin American market, being set in Mexico. “It did very well in the U.S. and is now moving in Season 2 to Spain,” Nobili said. “That’s an example of building a franchise from the get-go into a new IP.”

In large reassurance for producers in some parts of the world, Nobili said at Series Mania that a keen interest in franchises did not mean Paramount+ will be winding down its commitment to local originals.

“Our plans were to greenlight 150 local originals by 2025. We are way ahead of that plan. When you see the demand there is for local shows, it’s not surprising that we want to continue investing into that space,” said Nobili, referring to “a lot of new projects that are coming in the next 12-18 months that are really exciting for me,” such as “Sexy Beast” from the U.K: and “A Gentleman in Moscow,” starring Ewan McGregor. Variety