Mexican producer Leonardo Zimbrón: 2023 will define how the audiovisual industry will work in the next years

Mexican producer Leonardo Zimbrón assures that 2023 is a year of changes that will define the way how the audiovisual industry works and relates in the coming years. “These changes are going to come hand in hand with new business models,” he said after the closure of the Diploma program The Business of Ideas, organized by Punta Fina in Canacine.

“We’re in the middle of the year 2023 and it has already given us many surprises. We have seen different adjustments in studios and the platforms, and we have seen different stoppages and strikes… It is a year of adjustments, which we will remember because it will mark a review of our industry, of how business models, development, and production are done, which will affect how we will be working in the next five to eight years. Moments of opportunity and growth are certainly coming for everyone as long as we know how to make the best of these moments of change and take advantage of them to reshape and adjust the way we are working,” he said.

He said that part of this evolution and approach has to include fairer ways of working, taking advantage of this moment to eliminate errors, bad habits, and mistakes of the different current business models. “You have to take the best of the past, the best of the present, and look to the future,” he said.

He mentioned that the discussion raised by screenwriters and actors also has to do with independent producers. “You have to think about fairer ways of production, and in more organized and efficient ways of working.”

The new business models will have to do with other ways of linking the intellectual property of audiovisual products with the public, as happened with VOD and the arrival of platforms.

He assured that co-production opportunities will continue and international co-productions will return. “We are going to work with colleagues from other countries generating multinational stories, which in turn will change the storytelling and the way of selling to the platforms. It’s going to be a virtuous circle of new business models that will give us leverage if we give them the time to analyze.”

He also referred to the return of windowing but with different schemes for the business. “Windowing is coming back but we’re going to understand and remodel how the windows are going to work. I don’t think they’re going to work in the same way as before, because the rules are going to change and that’s going to lead to different management of the cost of licenses, license times, license territories.”

He explained that other types of adjustments and participation will come. “Who, how, and when participates in certain future sales? It was very clear in the syndication of television products in the past, the sales of territory in the syndication, particularly in the US generated many resources and profits which were distributed fairly or unfairly. Today the new models do not contemplate that syndication, nor it’s clear how future sales, royalties, and shares are divided. I think that the way we create business models for the different windows and take the product to the public is also going to be remodeled and redesigned,” said Zimbrón.

The producer commented that this was a win-for-all situation. “It is a model that can become sufficiently self-sustaining to reinvest and make production companies grow, give more opportunities to new writers, new actors, new directors, in short, it is a wave that can bring a new era of creation. For me it’s positive, is a year of very important changes, to which we must pay close attention.”
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