A ircraft Pictures co-president Anthony Leo aims to “push the envelope” of what a Canadian production can be with The Emperor’s Stone: The Search of La Buse’s Treasure.

The 6 x 60-minute family adventure series, which has been in development since 2020, is intended to be a large-scale production, with aspirations of a “high US$5 million” per episode budget. That ambition has required leaning into global partnerships, setting up a three-country coproduction with David Wicht of South Africa’s Film Afrika, and Mathieu Ageron, Maxime Delauney and Romain Rousseau of French prodco Nolita.

Aircraft confirmed the project’s first broadcasting partners earlier this month with French public broadcaster France Télévisions, Germany’s ZDF and Italy’s RAI coming on board following its selection from the European Alliance’s 2022 Autumn Call for Projects. The alliance was formed by the three broadcasters in 2018 with the aim of developing and financing high-end series for European and global audiences.

The project went into development in 2020 with Film Afrika already attached, Leo tells Playback Daily. Initial development was supported through the Canada Media Fund and South Africa’s National Film and Video Foundation development incentive. The creative team behind the project will be announced at a later date, according to Leo.

“We settled on this idea of a family pirate adventure series. Film Afrika has had a lot of experience working with period [pieces] and pirate ships, being the producers of shows like Black Sails and most recently One Piece for Netflix. We were attracted to the ambition of being able to do something in that vein, in a one-hour space, which Aircraft hadn’t done before,” says Leo.

From there, Leo says the project was fleshed out into a full concept, and the team linked up with executive producers Benjamin Anderson and Gina Marcheschi in L.A. to get the project market ready and seek out new financing. “And that’s when we saw the opportunity with the European Alliance,” he says.

But they needed a European coproduction company to be eligible for that, and France’s Nolita “stood out” to the team, thanks to their enthusiasm about the series.

They developed the project further before submitting it to the European Alliance, which shortlisted six projects for the in-person pitch round at the 2023 Series Mania festival in Lille, France in March. “In the end, I think it was [from] out of 89 projects that were submitted, [that] they picked The Emperor’s Stone.”

The companies created a demo to illustrate the project’s ambition, according to Leo, with Film Afrika and Nolita able to provide additional resources to give the demo a “premium look.” It helped that the Alliance “was actually looking for a great family adventure series,” says Leo.

The Emperor’s Stone: The Search of La Buse’s Treasure is in a new development phase now that France Télévisions, ZDF and RAI have come on board, according to Leo.

“One thing we had to be cognizant of when submitting it to them [European Alliance] is that you have three broadcasters from three different countries. I think it was really important for them to see their audiences represented in the project,” says Leo, noting that the changes to the series, which included changing some of the ethnicities of the characters, happened “very organically.”

The process, Leo says, made the project better and grounded it in “fantastic research,” including the discovery of “a really fantastic real-life story of a French pirate that fit exactly with our narrative.”

The team is currently in the process of writing the scripts to be able to get the project to greenlight by the second quarter of 2024. The team is also looking for an international distribution partner to close off the financing.

The target to go into production has been set for the end of 2024, with plans at this stage to film mostly in France and South Africa. Post-production and visual effects will take place in Canada.

“It’s exciting to have something that’s Canadian content be this big in scope,” says Leo. “I’m excited to push the envelope of what we can achieve as a Canadian production company with this.”

Photo courtesy of Aircraft Pictures