Marching on: CEO Zygi Kamasa reflects on True Brit Entertainment’s first year in business | Features

It has been one year since Zygi Kamasa launched his UK production and distribution venture True Brit Entertainment, which was announced – coincidentally, he says – during last year’s AFM with great fanfare around his ambitious strategy to co-finance more than $150m of UK independent productions over its first three years, backed by international music management company Three Six Zero.

The arrival of a substantial and well-resourced new player in the UK market was greeted warmly by the industry, particularly in the wake of eOne’s demise and Pathé’s retreat from the UK theatrical release space. Within a year, True Brit has managed to shepherd six features into production – well ahead of Kamasa’s original projections – and release its first film,The Critic.

“My model was building to four to eight movies a year, and I thought, ‘I’ll do two or three in year one,’” he says. “I’ve got six produced and a seventh – 500 Miles with Bill Nighy – has just started shooting. That’s very encouraging.”

True Brit’s plans around distribution are also coming into focus, with three recent hires joining the small team of executives Kamasa has been assembling: John Trafford-Owen, who has held senior sales and distribution roles at Studiocanal UK and Paramount Pictures, as head of theatrical sales; former eOne, STX and Universal Pictures exec Kate Willoughby as senior marketing manager; and Rob Barnes, also of eOne, as head of home entertainment.

They join previous hire Chris Besseling – another ex-eOne exec, who is head of theatrical distribution, marketing and publicity – and the company’s first release that it will handle itself will be Nick Love’s irreverent working-class crime comedy Marching Powder, starring Danny Dyer, which is scheduled to arrive in UK cinemas on January 31. (True Brit’s other key executive is head of acquisitions Nick Manzi, and the team now operates out of a new office in Fitzrovia.)

Building up to a theatrical release for True Brit’s inaugural production Marching Powder already had Kamasa buzzing, and the launch of the film’s red-band trailer on October 16 that received 5.4 million views in 48 hours (90% of those in the UK) across YouTube and other social channels has fuelled his optimism.

“I never like to jinx things but that’s up there with any blockbuster I’ve ever launched a trailer for. I don’t think I had that for Hunger Games or TheExpendables,” says Kamasa, referring to a pair of franchises he handled during his 15-year stint as CEO of Lionsgate UK. “Who knows what this translates to? But [the reaction to the trailer] is what I’d always hoped for, and the proof will be in January when we release it.”

Off the back of the trailer, streamers are now circling for global rights outside the UK, he adds.

Theatrical ambitions

True Brit’s first release out of the gate was an acquisition, having picked up The Critic  starring Ian McKellen and Gemma Arterton out of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, hired a new editor to retool the cut and then released it into UK cinemas this September through Lionsgate UK. Final box office will land around $2.2m (£1.7m), and Kamasa says he is satisfied with that: “We always said £1m-£2m. Do you always want a movie to do more? Yes, sure, I wish it had done four. I think it was a solid result to show what we could do.”

But acquisitions of completed films are not going to form a core part of the strategy. “I haven’t seen one since then that I wanted to buy,” he says. “I’m not going to pick up something that’s just going to go to home entertainment or digital; it has to be strong enough for theatrical release. So we’re more likely to check out British movies at Toronto, Berlin, Sundance screenings that are often world premieres and that no one’s seen. They’re the ones I don’t want to miss out on.”

On the production side, the True Brit model has been to board projects as a cornerstone financier and then help producers find the rest of the money. Between his own investment and the new UK Independent Film Tax Credit, which was officially ratified by the Labour government in early October, Kamasa says he has been able to get to between 50% and 70% of the budgets for True Brit’s first wave of projects.

Of the six projects that have gone into production this year, True Brit majority financed Marching Powder “for under $5m”, and with the others the producers or sales partners have been able to complete the budgets through private investors outside the UK. Producer Lee Magiday, for instance, brought in US equity partners on the Ramla Ali biopic In The Shadows, as did AGC Studios on Giant, another real-life boxing story about UK-Yemeni boxer ‘Prince’ Naseem Hamed; the “almost £12m” [$15.6m] budget for Gurinder Chadha’s holiday musical Christmas Karma was funded by True Brit, the UK tax credit and private equity from India.

It is frustrating to Kamasa that securing private equity in the UK remains a challenge. “I wish the government would look at something like EIS again, because I keep coming across high-net-worth private investors where you could find five people to put in £500,000 [$650,000] each, and suddenly you’ve got £2.5m [$3.2m]. EIS just helps with that, and it was completely cut off at the knees by the HMRC, partly because it was manipulated and abused by a lot of very clever accountants who then did it without risk.

“The idea of EIS is that it has got to be risky, and film is as risky as they come, so it’s perfect for EIS. It would be great to bring private investors back into the [UK] industry.”

Being in control of his productions means Kamasa can afford to play a waiting game when it comes to negotiating further deals. With Christmas Karma, for instance, he and Chadha have discussed screening it to one or two of the top sales companies to forge an international strategy, ahead of the film’s 2025 end-of-year UK release.

“It’s got scale, it’s got a great, eclectic cast, it has great music. It’s a Christmas movie, so it’s not for every territory in the world, but it definitely feels like a very strong play for a lot of distributors,” says Kamasa. “The streamers too – they’ve all put their hands up while we’ve been making it. At the end of the day, our strategy is, let’s just make a really good film, and then you should be able to make sales afterward.”

Despite his own spending spree, Kamasa believes a fundamental challenge for the industry is bringing the cost of independent production down after years of inflation. Even with the well-documented struggles of freelance crew off the back of the strikes and a decline in TV production, inward investment is still the key driver for employment and given the choice between signing for a streamer production or an independent one, it will rarely go the indie producer’s way.

Because of that, Kamasa – who chaired the BFI-led Commission on UK Independent Film in 2017-18 – is advocating for some kind of industry mechanism or intervention that encourages crew to work on indie films for lower rates.

“I don’t want to deter the Netflix and Amazons and Apples because they’re funding a lot of those big productions. It’s great for the UK industry,” he says. “But we’ve got to create a way of encouraging those same crew to work for less on a low-budget indie, or some way of better training for the younger crew to come up and get their breaks on low-budget movies, because otherwise it’s prohibitive.

“I don’t know what the solution is yet,” he adds.

Home entertainment and Pay-1

Kamasa initially considered outsourcing the home entertainment side of the business but having researched the market, he says, “It’s not like DVD anymore where you have to go out and sell to hundreds of retail stores. Home entertainment is now eight, nine partners. Sky and Amazon are 50% of the market; ITunes and Google and a few others make up another 30%. It’s not unlike cinemas – once you deal with the three chains, you’ve covered 75% the marketplace. It took this year for me to analyse that it made sense for us to do it in-house, because then we can control our destiny.”

The CEO also says True Brit is in a strong position for its Pay-1 deals, especially as streamers appear to have scaled back on UK feature production – and he’s having conversations with all of the big players (including Netflix, Amazon and Sky).

“No one else is doing just British movies and they all love that, because they all have their subscribers in the UK and they all admitted early on, they don’t get enough strong British movies,” he says. “It’s taken me a year to sort of pitch them and sell them and now that they’ve seen our slate, they’re going, ‘Oh right, I see, these are proper commercial studio British movies.’

“No disrespect for any other movies out there but we’re not making small British arthouse movies, we’re making commercial British films, some that will work great at the box office and some that won’t; that’s the nature of our business, but they’re all really strong.”

Kamasa confirms he’s weighing up multiple Pay-1 offers for a mixture of True Brit’s slate, or individual titles, and is looking to get the deals (or deal) tied up before the holidays.

“At least one has offered for all my movies for next year, another company is saying they’d like two or three of them. It’s just a negotiation now – it’s always great as a seller to have multiple buyers. But I’m in no rush because I’ve already made the movies, I’ve invested in them already, it doesn’t change my economics.”

The executive’s time is currently focused on the titles in post-production. “I’m seeing a lot of cuts, screening the movies with the filmmakers,” he says. “We’re testing some of them.”

There is also a significant acquisition that came to True Brit as an agency package — WME Independent’s The Death Of Robin Hood starring Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer, which is due to go into production early next year. Despite being so quick out of the gates, Kamasa does not see the need to change up his original ambitions.

“I’m in no rush to do another five, six, seven movies next year. So that may slow a little bit,” he says. “A lot of people said, ‘Oh, congratulations, you’ve done six films this year.’ And my response is, ‘Well, it’s actually kind of easy when you’re just writing a cheque.’ The proof in the pudding will be, have we made these movies work? Have they delivered, have they performed?

“Some will, some won’t, but [my backers] are aware it’s a long game, and if I have some hits early on, that’s great because I can reinvest that money and keep going.”