Film accelerator CineCoup has appointed Sean Buckley, founder and CEO of Buck Productions, as its new chief content officer.

CineCoup CEO and founder J. Joly tells Playback that Buckley, who remains as Buck’s founder and CEO, will develop CineCoup’s branded content strategy. Joly says the idea and strategy are still in development, and will include bringing bigger partners on board as part of the company’s financing structure going forward.

CineCoup will use that financing to help run the accelerator and put the dollars into branded marketing and promo opportunities. Buckley’s role will also extend to producing future content, including possible CineCoup-related TV content, Joly adds.

Buckley’s expertise in branded content includes CBC’s Mitsubishi City Chase and Canada’s Best Beauty Talent for Rogers Media and L’Oreal Paris, as well as the new docu-reality series McMorris & McMorris, a partnership between Buck and Red Bull Media House. On the film side, Buckley’s exec producer credits include Canuck films Defendor and A Beginner’s Guide to Endings.

With production now underway in Regina and Moose Jaw on CineCoup’s inaugural project , Wolfcop, Joly is looking ahead to the second cycle of the film accelerator.

He says he thinks they’ll turn a profit on the Wolfcop, which has a budget of just over $1 million, adding that there’s a chance that three other CineCoup projects will go to camera within the next year.

CineCoup holds rights options to all of the top 10 projects from the first cycle. The initial goal, he says, was to get producers on board some of those projects to produce them in parallel.

But the focus has shifted to actively building financing for the CineCoup slate, through “a partner, an investor, a group of investors who really see the value of these sub-three million dollar, low-budget, high ROI genre films that CineCoup, as a launchpad, surfaces,” Joly says.

Wolfcop hit all the marks for a greenlight out of CineCoup’s first round– it could be produced around the $1 million mark, had a strong team, and the filmmakers were successful in marketing the project on an international level.

Some of the other projects, says Joly, need more time in the incubator, either to develop the scripts, or because the projects require more than $1 million in financing.

The goal with CineCoup, at its core, is to make a commercially viable film through its disruptive model.

“To me, it’s more important to get the film made than to spend two years working on the script. I’m not here to be a film school, we want to make movies,” says Joly. He notes that in response to concerns and criticism of the CineCoup model that the accelerator isn’t for filmmakers’ indie dream projects, but for the ones that can realistically get made and get to market.

“Save your Mean Streets, come make Boxcar Bertha with me,” he says. “I just think most Canadians, when given the chance, and when you present these filmmakers to them, a lot of people don’t want to eat bran muffins everyday – they actually want a donut once in a while. We make donuts.”