EXCLUSIVE: The Amazing Maurice producer Cantilever Media and sales and financing outfit Architect have formed a joint venture that aims to get two animated movies per year up and running. The pair have their first project, a family feature adaptation of Guy Kennaway’s novel Bird Brain. Dana Dorian (Lego City Adventures) will direct.
The JV covers financing and international sales. Cantilever has launched its own distribution company, Kazoo Films, which works across animated movies in the UK and Ireland, and the Cantilever-Architect JV will handle rest of the world sales for the projects coming out of their partnership.
Cantilever co-produced Terry Pratchett adaption The Amazing Maurice with Germany’s Ulysses Filmproduktion. The same team is behind the sequel, which is now in production. Company CEO Andrew Baker told Deadline about his goal of creating UK-flavored indie animated features. “I was very keen to get into feature animation…and The Amazing Maurice, for me, was very much the test case,” he said. “There were a few other films that were happening and you look at Aardman, but compared to the rest of Europe, the UK wasn’t in this independent feature animation space and I couldn’t quite work out why, because we certainly had the skills here.”
Cantilever is a producer on Bollywoof and Wed Wabbit, which like The Amazing Maurice and its upcoming sequel are originals for Sky Cinema. Sky is, however, not committing to more original movies, so Cantilever has had to find new partners and ways to finance its UK-originated animated family fare. It has inked a co-production deal with DNEG’s ReDefine Originals and often works with Viva Pictures on U.S. distribution.
Going forward, ReDefine Originals will be the animation studio for films produced by Cantilever Media. Kazoo Films will then take UK rights and the joint-venture and Architect will manage rest-of-world sales. Per that model, Bird Brain, which is budgeted at about $13M, will be a co-production between Cantilever, ReDefine Originals, Kazoo Films and Architect, which will be in Berlin with a script and design work from the project.
The Bird Brain film, like the book, will follow Basil “Banger” Peyton-Crumb, a crusty British aristocrat obsessed with game hunting. After a hunting accident, he awakes to find himself transformed into a pheasant, meaning he must band together with his previous prey to survive. Netflix had an option on the book, but Cantilever moved fast when that lapsed.
Architect, meanwhile, was launched in 2023 by Calum Gray, Max Pirkis, Patrick Fischer and Richard Kondal, and was formed in partnership with Creativity Capital and Big Safari. Speaking about the new JV, Gray said: “Andrew and the Cantilever Team are some of the very best practitioners of animation outside the US studio system. Crucially, this new partnership allows us to pool intelligence gleaned from the international territories and the UK distribution business to feed into story design and optimization from inception.”
“When we’d launched Kazoo, we said that one day we could really do having a sales agency partnership,” Baker added. “We were looking at who we could work with at precisely that moment that Max and Callum approached me and said: ‘Our buyers, the other distributors, are asking if we have any animation, we really need animation’. So, we’ve agreed a joint venture where Architect is going to sell animated features that Cantilever is producing and we’re looking at doing two movies a year.”
English (US) ·