London Book Fair: TV & Film Agents Say Dealmaking Appetite Remains For Killer IP Amid Volatile Market

UTA’s Co-Head of Media Rights, Jason Richman, is feeling reflective after one of the most shocking beginnings to a year the entertainment industry can remember. The prominent lit exec is considering how the industry has been recovering from the California wildfires that tore through neighborhoods in January, as he prepares for the London Book Fair (LBF), kicking off thousands of miles away this week in the UK. Richman will be repping the likes of Adam Kay’s thriller A Particularly Nasty Case and Jemimah Wei’s The Original Daughter and sees the event as a reset opportunity for the international book-to-screen market.

“The fires in L.A. were an awful way to start the year,” he tells us. “As L.A. heals, rebuilds, and transitions into our new normal, the film and TV industry is ramping back up. Lots of new development has commenced, and there seems to be a renewed energy and excitement to escape into a great book and help shepherd its journey to screen.”

In a volatile economic climate, many will be hoping Richman’s sentiment manifests at the LBF, where hoards of TV and film executives will attend alongside the great and the good of the literary business. In recent years, one of the busiest weeks in the publishing calendar has seen something of a small and big screen invasion, as producers and agents sniffing out the next Normal People, Lessons in Chemistry or Conclave descend on the English capital to see what’s what.

This year, sources predict the LBF will be packed full of TV and film folk, but in a market battling multiple headwinds, and with many book-to-screen projects currently stuck in limbo, there are question marks over getting projects over the line.

“Agents are sceptical about those big-name TV companies who were going in and buying expensive book options with these huge claims, and now nothing has happened,” one producer tells us. “When film and TV agents send catalogs out to producers there are lots of books you see and you just think, ‘Oh my god that’s out of option.’ We are a long way from the craziness of 2022.”

That “craziness” saw dozens of British books taken on for option by the big American players during what was a post-Covid boom era for the TV drama industry. But three years on, the UK TV industry has been rocked by the revelation that a number of high-profile projects for pubcasters are effectively stuck in limbo as big American players pull out of the co-pro market, with a number of these projects understood to be book adaptations. One high-profile example we revealed recently is the BBC’s adaptation of Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize winner Shuggie Bain. “The big literary titles are really struggling,” says the producer.

United Agents’ Jen Thomas is repping a number of novels and clients at the LBF and says there is “slightly more caution” than in previous years, with buyers mostly keen to see how well books perform post-publication rather than snapping novels up before they come out.

But Thomas notes that the market “feels resilient” and says her diary is stuffed full of meetings. “We’ve not had any big ticket items that have stalled,” she adds. “This is mainly about getting face-to-face time with the in-house book scouts at the studios, freelance book scouts and producers. It is often a busy time on the publishing side so I get to learn about what’s coming down the pipeline.”

With the TV slowdown in mind, sources predict the pendulum may swing back to the big screen when it comes to options. Hannah Griffiths, Banijay’s Head of Adaptations, says the industry may channel the 1990s when “speculative” film options for books of yesteryear were much more in vogue. She points to the success of Edward Berger’s Oscar winner Conclave, which was based on a Robert Harris book from nearly a decade ago, and she predicts recent hit novels like Booker Prize-winner Orbital, a high-concept offering that is set in space, may struggle in the optioning market.

The big TV adaptations that have broken through in recent months, such as Sky and Peacock’s The Day of the Jackal, Netflix’s One Day and Disney+’s Rivals, are unlikely to be the sort of deals that will be struck at LBF, Griffiths adds.

United Agents’ Thomas, who reps the likes of What it Feels Like for a Girl scribe Paris Lees, says LBF is a “good time to remind people of our backlist that may have fallen out of option,” adding: “Sometimes you can have another bite of the cherry in terms of this matchmaking.”

CAA books agent Yasmin McDonald strikes an optimistic tone, positing that “having IP at the heart of the project tends to be reassuring to broadcasters and financiers,” and adding: “If you’ve got prestige IP then it could attract big actors, writers and directors, and having those elements helps get something to screen more quickly. In a funny way, the constraints of the past couple of years allow IP to break through.”

Helping the market along is a rise in translation deals in the weeks and months leading up to the LBF, McDonald and her colleague Michelle Kroes tell us. In an “historically unusual” move, they say plenty deals have been struck on the non-English translation side before a book is sold to an American publisher due to the growing appetite for non-English fare. “That is a good indicator of how buoyant the market is, and I think film and TV buyers are tracking what’s happening with that,” says McDonald.

Trends and buzz

“There isn’t a real ‘book of the fair’ right now,” says Claire Lundberg, owner and CEO of literary scouting agency CTL Scouting, who is keeping a close eye on what organically materializes during the market, where there are many breakout contenders. “There’s no Ministry of Time or Lessons in Chemistry this year.”

There is buzz building around the likes of Five by Ilona Banister and Alan Opts Out by Courtney Maum, which are cited by sources as ones to watch. We also published a review of seven titles that come with strong credentials from the likes of The Night Agent scribe Matthew Quirk, This is Going to Hurt writer Kay and Oliver Bullough, whose books on money laundering have been agenda-setting.

Several sources have pointed to Broken Toys, a book by British journalist and editor Marie-Claire Chappet that sits in the curious publishing subgenre of young adult novels set around elite Scottish universities. Set in 2008 and following two young women who form a complicated friendship to as they study and party through their uni years, it has drawn comparisons to Saltburn. UK agency Peters Fraser + Dunlop is billing it as “a sharp, searing campus novel; a Prep for the next generation, for those enraptured by Euphoria.”

The Peters Fraser + Dunlop media rights agent representing the title at LBF, Rosie Gurtovoy, confirms there have been bids. “There’s been an amazing response, and we’ve had just over ten offers from the U.S. and UK, with streaming platforms backing bids,” she says.

Perhaps the Scotland trend has something to do with St Andrews University, where Prince William met and began his relationship with Catherine, Princess of Wales (then simply Kate Middleton), which was portrayed in The Crown. “Broken Toys is brilliantly adaptable, with a great ensemble cast,” says Gurtovoy. “It’s witty and racy with lots of emotion, centering on the British university experience. It’s a novel slightly younger readers can aspire to and older readers will feel nostalgic for, and that’s what’s interesting for TV: Streamers and producers want this type story after One Day and Normal People.”

Not only that, but Gurtovoy notes its open-ended conclusion leaves a second season possible, which plays into the need for returnable stories. Many of the books that have broken through as TV shows in recent years have been limited series, but these are considered more and more risky in today’s complicated economic climate. A number of the people with spoke with for this article note how key returnability has become to getting projects off the page and into production. Lundberg, who started out working for Scott Rudin and ran MGM’s New York lit office before launching her consultancy, notes how things are coming full circle – or almost.

“When I started, I was doing feature scouting primarily as television was very focused on syndication, and it is quite hard to get to 100 episodes,” she recalls. “Once that broke down, many books that are great limited series came through. That financial model doesn’t really work now, and people just want more episodes. It’s not 100 episodes anymore, but it is not limited series.”

She says the current sweet spot is finding books that can provide around three seasons of roughly 35 episodes. These often need an “engine” such as a family business or a crime syndicate at their core to allow producers to build out characters and plots while staying close to the main themes.

With this in mind, United Agents’ Thomas says she has clocked an “uptick” in children’s books being optioned and made into animated projects, which can be scaled up to series of around the 20 to 25 episode mark for networks like CBeebies or Sky Kids. “These are interesting deals,” she says. “What’s nice for our clients is a lot of them are both writers and illustrators, so they can be involved in a creative capacity with the shows.”

Lundberg notes that the trends in book publishing and screen productions are diverging, as novel genres and themes move away from the lower-budget concepts TV buyers want right now such as procedurals.

“In books, there is real desire for escapism, which has most manifested in romantasy, and that is very expensive on TV,” she says. “I tend to think any time there is a huge trend like that, which is literally raising the bottom line of publishing houses, there will be appetite, but this is coming at a time when the pendulum is tipping toward economic prudence and you don’t think about that when you’re writing a novel.”

Indeed, romantasy – a subgenre of romance and fantasy – has been a huge driver in book sales, but has not mirrored that success on screen. Hulu recently scrapped a long-gestating adaptation of Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns, in which a young adult huntress is transported to a magical land after killing a wolf, and Lundberg says TV execs are broadly looking at lower-budget, “grounded romance, which is easier for adaptation.”

There is life in the genre, though. We hear Prime Video’s adaptation of Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing, which is set in a brutal magical war college, where students either graduate or die, is moving ahead, and there are whispers that Netflix has quietly been building a romantasy slate that should begin materializing this year.

Also popular in publishing is ‘dark academia’, a broad publishing subgenre that has at least in part inspired the themes and/or aesthetics of shows such as The Umbrella Academy, Wednesday, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and A Discovery of Witches. Going further back, think movies including The Dead Poets Society, Cruel Intentions and Kill Your Darlings. Like Broken Toys, lots of these novels are set in Ivy League or British redbrick universities (or fictionalized versions of them).

Big agencies out in full force

Whether there is some business, slow business or no business, TV and film agents from both sides of the Atlantic will be out in force among the 25,000+ likely to attend the LBF. In recent years, Griffiths reckons there has been a “massive uptick in TV and film people” journeying to the Olympia in Hammersmith, coupled with a slight dip in more traditional faces from the publishing world.

“Execs, scouts and producers will fly in from all over the world,” adds Peters Fraser + Dunlop’s Gurtovoy. “They feel a book adaptation is a surer thing in a risk-averse market.”

CAA, WME and UTA along with its UK outfit Curtis Brown all occupy mega stands and their mid-week parties are some of the hottest tickets in town. “Based on the guestlist for UTA and Curtis Brown’s party, the number is definitely up,” says UTA’s Richman. “In all seriousness, we’re expecting a busy year across the board with many producers and executives who hadn’t been in attendance in previous years making the trek over to London.”

Most attendees are here to network and meet people from the book world. In recent years, Banijay’s Griffiths says LBF has become more about networking and less about publishers signing big deals on the dotted line, which mirrors what has happened to traditional TV markets like MIPCOM.

“Traditional agents would say they don’t wait for LBF anymore,” she adds. “The business carries on through the year. Every month has the same amount of submissions whereas before the market was focused on the Frankfurt Book Fair in October and London in March.”

CAA’s McDonald, who says the agency has struck 110 deals in the past three years for TV series, film and theater adaptations, agrees, noting that LBF is now “more about relationships, getting the word out there and having that diaolgue through the year so people are aware what’s coming.”

However the business is getting done, Richman notes there is, and always will be, business to do. “Undoubtably buyers are being cautious and selective, but we’re finding if they love a book, they’re going all in for it,” he says.

In a troubled political and economic climate that has made escaping into a good book perhaps more pleasurable than ever, it will be fascinating to see how the coming days play out.