The New Global Mandate: Why International Co-Production Strategies Are Essential

The production ecosystem has entered a period of unprecedented global activity.

Film and TV production has reached historic highs, with the number of feature films produced worldwide in the latest reporting cycle surpassing pre-pandemic levels, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

The broader global film and video production market, valued at $297 billion in 2024, is projected to see a 14.6% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) for movie production through 2029, as noted by BusinessDojo.

This growth is inherently global, with regions like Asia-Pacific expected to be the fastest-growing market, according to Grand View Research.

For executives, a successful international co-production provides three fundamental value streams that are inaccessible to purely domestic projects:

1. Shared Financial Burden: Production budgets are increasingly complex. Co-productions allow partners to divide the financial risk, making larger, more ambitious projects viable.
2. Access to Incentives and Tax Breaks: Many countries offer substantial tax credits, rebates, or subsidies—often with enhanced rates specifically for official co-productions—to stimulate local infrastructure and job growth. Competitive rates are now common, with jurisdictions like the UK and Saudi Arabia offering incentives as high as 40%, according to a recent analysis by Entertainment Partners.
3. Guaranteed Market Access: Co-productions often qualify as “local content” in the partner’s territory, which is essential for satisfying quota requirements and immediately securing a crucial pillar of the international distribution potential for the project.

This dynamic creates a strategic imperative: to move beyond relying on traditional networks and to employ a systematic, data-led approach to finding the right collaborators for production partners.

The risk of inaction—of limiting a project to a single market’s financial ceiling—is now greater than the risk of engaging in a complex, yet calculated, cross-border deal.

Navigating the International Co-Production Maze: Core Challenges

The complexity of executing successful international co-production strategies lies in a fundamental asymmetry of information.

While the financial opportunity is clear, the execution is hampered by a fragmented entertainment supply chain where critical data remains siloed.

Challenge 1: The Fragmentation of Partner Discovery

The global M&E landscape is dominated by small to mid-sized production firms (SMEs) that represent over 90% of all companies worldwide, according to BusinessDojo.

For a US studio executive or European financier, finding the right production partners in a specific foreign market—say, the fastest-growing regions in Asia or the incentive hubs in the Mediterranean—is a high-friction process.

• Lack of Vetted Track Records: Traditional scouting relies on market gossip or film festival introductions, which provide little verifiable data on a partner’s complete collaboration history, their true scale, or their alignment with specific genres.
• Opaque Networks: It is difficult to map the corporate ownership and key executive decision-makers within a potential partner company, which is crucial for assessing long-term stability and compatibility.

Challenge 2: Mapping Competitive Incentives and Financial Risk

Global film financing hinges on the accurate and timely application of local incentives. However, this landscape changes constantly, introducing significant cross-border production risk:

• Incentive Volatility: As the Motion Picture Association (MPA) notes, incentive systems are constantly being revised and optimized to maintain competitiveness. The UK recently introduced the Independent Film Tax Credit at nearly 40% for qualifying films, while Greece’s popular rebate is undergoing revisions. Executives must track these shifts dynamically, not just at a country level, but often at a regional or even municipal level (e.g., Spain’s Canary Islands vs. the Basque region).
• Spend Qualification Complexity: The rules for qualifying production expenditure vary dramatically. Hungary, for instance, allows a portion of the spend to occur outside of Hungary while still qualifying for its incentive, creating an arbitrage opportunity that must be tracked precisely. Manually calculating the net effective rate of incentive stacking is a full-time, resource-intensive activity.

Challenge 3: Ensuring Cultural and Creative Alignment

A co-production is fundamentally a creative partnership, and cultural distance presents a material risk. Beyond the obvious language barrier, creative disagreements or operational misalignments can derail a project.

• Creative Control: Co-production treaties often stipulate minimum creative contributions (e.g., director, cast, head of department) from each partner country. Balancing these legal requirements with the artistic vision requires deep insight into a partner’s creative specialization and past collaboration styles.
• Reputational Risk: A partner’s past failures in meeting delivery schedules, managing budgets, or handling complex intellectual property (IP) issues can become the principal entity’s liability. Vetting must extend beyond a single project and cover the entire body of work and the stability of the executive team.

The Executive’s Framework for Co-Production Strategies

Successful international co-production strategies require a methodology that replaces fragmented research with a unified, data-driven system. I recommend a three-pillar framework for any executive approaching a new cross-border project.

Strategy 1: The Data-Driven Partner Vetting Protocol

The most critical step is the selection of a trustworthy and capable co-production partner. This protocol shifts the focus from a partner’s self-reported reputation to a verifiable data trail.

1. Map All Collaborators: Identify every company involved in a potential partner’s last five projects—from the lead financier to the post-production house. This reveals their operational network and typical scale of work.
2. Verify Executive Movement: Track the key decision-makers (CXOs, Heads of Department) to ensure the talent that produced past successful projects remains with the potential partner. High executive turnover is a leading indicator of instability.
3. Genre and Scale Alignment: Focus on partners whose verified track record aligns perfectly with the current project’s genre (e.g., high-end TV drama vs. independent feature film) and budget scale. Finding co-production partners with similar historical project size reduces risk of scope creep or overextension.

Strategy 2: Leveraging Official Co-production Agreements (Treaties)

The bedrock of minimizing legal and financial risk in cross-border projects is the use of officially sanctioned co-production treaties.

These are bilateral or multilateral agreements (e.g., between two nations or within a trade bloc like the Council of Europe) that formalize the rules for production, ensuring the resulting work is recognized as national content in both territories.

• Treaty vs. Co-Financing: It is crucial to distinguish a formal treaty co-production (where contributions are often creative and financial, and strict cultural criteria apply) from a simple co-financing arrangement (which is purely financial, with no legal production status granted). Only official treaties reliably unlock the full range of national subsidies and quotas.
• The Chain of Eligibility: An executive must trace the eligibility from the treaty down to the specific incentive program. For example, a Franco-German co-production falling under a bilateral treaty may then qualify for France’s CNC Automatic Subsidies or Germany’s DFFF film fund, provided all treaty and local content requirements are met.

Strategy 3: Dynamic Incentive Stacking and Tax Optimization

The most advanced co-production strategy involves “stacking” incentives—combining benefits from multiple jurisdictions to achieve the highest possible Return on Investment (ROI).

I must stress that this requires dynamic tracking, not static knowledge. With jurisdictions continuously competing on rates and eligibility, the most valuable strategy is to track the precise timing of incentive changes.

For example, Ireland and the UK have recently introduced highly competitive programs, while territories like Saudi Arabia have announced substantial new entrants with 40% incentives.

The optimal production location is defined by the financial conditions available on the day the deal is structured. This strategy must be underpinned by a centralized data source capable of providing real-time competitive intelligence.

Conclusion: The Future of Global Content Creation

The complexity of international co-production strategies is a direct reflection of the opportunity they unlock: access to billions in funding and billions of potential viewers.

The executive mandate has shifted from managing content acquisition to mastering the supply chain—a task that is fundamentally about managing information.

While the market continues to expand and incentives increase global competition for production spend, the traditional methods of discovery and vetting remain obsolete.

The fragmentation of the global content ecosystem is the single greatest inhibitor of deal flow. To mitigate cross-border production risk and maximize the value of global partnerships, a data-driven approach is mandatory.

The future of global content creation belongs to the executive who can instantly cut through market noise, leverage verifiable partner track records, and confidently navigate the complex incentive landscape.

This level of strategic intelligence is no longer optional; it is the prerequisite for success in the M&E industry.