A s it ramps up commissions and delves more into the feature film space with the new biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, The Roku Channel says it’s “very actively working with a number of Canadian producers and production companies.”

David Eilenberg (pictured), VP and head of Roku Originals, spoke about the company’s strategy at last week’s Playback Film Summit. He pointed to the AVOD streaming platform’s acquisition of CTV comedy Children Ruin Everything (New Metric Media in association with Bell Media), Boat Rocker-produced Slip and adult animated series Doomlands from Blue Ant Media’s Look Mom! Productions as examples of Roku’s interest in the Canadian market.

“We have shows that we’re producing in Canada, even if they’ve emanated from U.S. companies; we have a number of deals on the books with Lionsgate,” he said in a keynote conversation during the two-day summit. “So we’re really engaged with the Canadian creative community…. There are all kinds of different ways that business is getting done, and we see Canada as not just a place to make U.S. content but as one of the preeminent creative hubs in the world.”

Roku Originals is “really open-minded at this stage” in its evolution, and Canadian producers and creators interested in working with the ad-supported service can get in touch through talent agencies and management companies, he added.

“That is mostly where our pitches come from, so we’re not dissimilar to other platforms in that respect,” said Eilenberg. “But certainly, because we have working relationships with so many established producers, production companies and studios in Canada, it can also sometimes just be direct through conversations with those folks.”

Produced by Funny Or Die and Tango, the Los Angeles-shot Weird stars Daniel Radcliffe as performer “Weird Al” Yankovic, who wrote the film with director and executive producer Eric Appel. Yankovic produces, along with Mike Farah, Joe Farrell and Whitney Hodack for Funny Or Die, and Tim Headington, Lia Buman and Max Silva for Tango.

Funny Or Die’s Henry Muñoz III and Tango’s Neil Shah are executive producers on the project, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the People’s Choice Award in the Midnight Madness category.

Eilenberg didn’t reveal the film’s budget but called it “a scrappy little comedy in some respects,” noting Roku perceives itself “as a true independent in the landscape.”

“Anybody who’s involved will tell you it was a pretty wild 18-day shoot, to get the whole feature made. So it’s great that that it feels ambitious on the face of it, I think the end-product is terrific. But we’re also a newcomer still, and we’re trying to taken an underdog mentality to our productions as a result.”

Weird is Roku’s second feature film after the two-hour movie sequel to the NBC series Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist.

In both cases, Roku was “following creative instincts and tapping into fandom,” said Eilenberg. “We want to find properties in both film and series that can tap into viewers’ existing passions, but in a way that feels new and unexpected.”

Roku Originals launched just over a year ago with early acquisitions including the This Old House brand and the Quibi library. Charlie Collier, former CEO of Fox Entertainment, became president of Roku Media in October.

Roku is now in a “ramp up” phase and “actively commissioning a bunch of series that are now slated to drop in ’23,” said Eilenberg, who appeared at the summit last Tuesday (Nov. 15), before Roku announced plans to lay off 200 staff in the U.S. on Thursday (Nov. 17). The cuts do not affect Eilenberg’s stated strategy, Playback Daily understands.

The platform is looking for a mix of genres across its programming slate — in both scripted and unscripted, features and series.

“It’ll be a pretty broad offering, when all is said and done,” said Eilenberg. “All of that said, as somebody who loves comedy and also sees people going to the Roku platform and seeking out comedy, I think comedy may be part of our DNA as as we further evolve the brand.”

Untold, interesting stories with sports as a backdrop is something Eilenberg will also be looking at, he said.

While Roku is mostly concentrating on series at the moment, specifically formatted series and features are “a big part” of its future.

Films they can “make a big event out of” works well for them from a marketing perspective, he said. Their early film slate is more comedy-heavy, “because that does seem to be the brand that we’ve set forward.”

“That’s not to say that at some point, we wouldn’t do the right action film or thriller, even the right drama,” he said. “But I do think people are starting to associate our brand, at least our feature brand, with comedy. We’ll be doing them in an indie way at indie budgets.”

Roku would also consider “the right doc feature that can make sense for our audience,” he said. “And we’ve started just sort of dabbling, looking particularly at interesting pop-culture docs that could resonate with Roku viewers. So not a top priority, but something that I think I could see us doing in the more medium-term future.”

Having a celebrity or studio attached to a feature is helpful, but the Roku development team is writing-focused and often greenlights a project based on reading material that they “got really excited about,” said Eilenberg.

“Oftentimes, it is just a spec script, either something that’s with a studio or independent. There have been many instances, even in these early days, when we’ve started with just a writer who has a script and then helped find the other assets to put around it — be it a studio partner or a showrunner, in the case of series, or a director in the case of films. So it’s not the only pathway, but a finished piece of writing tends to be where we’ve been jumping off for our development and commissioning process.”