French-Hungarian Series ‘Rematch’ Proves There Can Be More Than One Show About Chess That Gets People Talking

Welcome to Global Breakouts, Deadline’s strand in which, each fortnight, we shine a spotlight on the TV shows and films killing it in their local territories. The industry is as globalized as it’s ever been, but breakout hits are appearing in pockets of the world all the time and it can be hard to keep track. So we’re going to do the hard work for you.

A very European outing this week, as we spotlight a French-Hungarian series telling the story of the unprecedented 1997 chess match between Garry Kasparov and… a supercomputer, which has plenty resonance nearly 30 years on. Arte’s Rematch won big at Series Mania earlier this year and streamers have taken rights in a wealth of different territories. Could a U.S. sale be on the cards?

Name: Rematch
Country: France-Hungary
Network: Arte
Producer: Arte, Unité
For fans of: The Queen’s Gambit
Distributor: Federation Studios

The idea for Rematch had been percolating for three years when Netflix suddenly launched a series that, somehow, made the 1,500-year-old game of chess sexy. Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, The Queen’s Gambit was one of the streamer’s biggest hits of 2020, as millions around the world lapped up the drama and turned to the age-old pastime to keep themselves going as lockdown rumbled on.

Rematch co-writer Yan England was nervous. “We suddenly started hearing about The Queen’s Gambit and I was like, ‘Woah, that’s about chess’,” he tells Deadline as he begins the story. “It had a huge impact.”

Yet rather than feeling like The Queen’s Gambit had pipped them to the post, the team behind the series about Garry Kasparov’s iconic 1997 match-up against an IBM supercomputer realized that they could set up their own game. Furthermore, the success of The Queen’s Gambit had, in fact, done them a favor by placing their subject matter firmly in the zeitgeist.

“Suddenly, people from around the world were playing chess,” says England. “We knew it would be a while before our show would come out as we couldn’t shoot in the pandemic so now the world had been reintroduced to chess and we didn’t have to explain what it was.”

Monica Levy, who was eventually tasked with selling the show for French major Federation Studios, says The Queen’s Gambit has acted as a great sales hook for Rematch. “It definitely had a positive effect on the public,” she adds. “Chess became ‘hip’ and many groups of young and old people started playing in clubs.”

Making the first move

Rather than being inspired by Netflix’s hit, Rematch was in fact born years earlier from a conversation between Canadian native England and French producer Bruno Nahon. England recalls that he was giving Nahon tips on his tennis forehand when Nahon let him into a long-held desire to make a project about the run-off between one of the world’s greatest ever chess grandmasters and a new breed of supercomputer. England, whose grandfather loved chess and whose dad was a sports journalist, dug into some research and, “24 hours later I had called back and said, ‘Bruno this is our topic’.”

The pandemic slowed things down — fortuitously as it turned out — but French-German network Arte was interested. Along with co-writer André Gulluni, England, who was Oscar-nominated for 2011 short Henry, set about learning everything he could about chess, Kasparov and the relative ability of IBM’s Deep Blue.

When it came to casting, the team wanted someone with similar drive, settling on British actor Christian Cooke, who worked with a chess specialist in order to hone his technique.

“When Garry Kasparov knew a move would have psychological impact he would sort of ‘screw’ a piece into the board,” says England. “There is a certain way chess players take pieces that has a sort of emotional investment, so we took these actors and had them trained. You want the audience to say, ‘They know how to play chess’.”

Kasparov won the first game in 1997 but lost the rematch in what was at the time the first defeat of a reigning world chess champion by a computer under tournament conditions. The battle sparked worldwide debate about the power of machines, generating headlines, including a Newsweek front cover that declared Kasparov’s first match victory as “The Brain’s last stand.”

Deadline speaks with England in the week British broadcaster ITV was revealed to be looking for a Head of Generative AI Innovation, and England says the team was always intrigued by the way in which Kasparov’s match still resonates.

“When we started working on Rematch this conversation about AI was slowly progressing, so we were always looking into the mystery about AI,” he adds. “That’s why this wasn’t just a biopic of Kasparov and we have dramatized certain things.”

In the new world of ChatGPT, Levy says Rematch’s strength lies in its being “contemporary and historical simultaneously.” While the show may not quite have matched The Queen’s Gambit for global success, Arte says it has been watched nearly three million times on its streaming platform, while it attracted awards buzz, winning the coveted Grand Prize at Series Mania after premiering in Lille.

These boons have combined to help Federation strike a number of splashy deals across Europe including Disney+ taking the series in the UK and Warner Bros. Discovery doing the same for HBO Europe in Spain, Portugal, the Nordics, Iceland, the Baltics, Central Europe, Greece and the Netherlands.

“French shows have been growing more and more in terms of quality and recognition,” says Levy. “Quite a few series have pierced through the international scene, including our very own drama The Bureau, which will soon be released as The Agency by Paramount+ with Showtime, with George Clooney as the executive producer and Michael Fassbender and Richard Gere starring.”  

Levy, who brands Arte fare “a total indication of quality and audaciousness,” believes an American buyer for Rematch will surely swoop soon. “Rematch is a huge, English-speaking show that will definitely seduce audiences in the U.S. when the time is right,” she adds. “We are pacing our timing for this series with the U.S. buyers, when mergers will hopefully be over and budgets will be back on track.”

With a subject matter this resonant, it’s surely only a matter of time before Federation is able to say ‘checkmate’ in the States.