Category: Entertainment

COL Group and CP Group are teaming on a partnership aimed at building up Thailand’s short-form drama business, linking creative training, local content production and distribution under a single initiative.

The deal centers on a talent incubation program the two firms will run jointly with an academic institution in Thailand, aimed at connecting new creative talent with the short-form entertainment sector. The companies said the effort is meant to widen the pipeline of talent feeding Thailand’s entertainment industry over time.

As part of the tie-up, the two companies will also work on what they’re calling a Thai Remake Collaboration, adapting select titles from COL Group’s and FlareFlow’s libraries specifically for Thai viewers. Rather than simple translation, the chosen stories will be reworked with Thai characters, settings and language, using AIGC-enabled production tools to support the localization process. COL Group is contributing its content library and short-form production know-how, while CP Group brings its local creator network and knowledge of the Thai market.

On the distribution side, FlareFlow will get a dedicated branded corner inside Tatang by TrueID, the short-form drama app run by True Corporation, part of CP Group. Called FlareFlow Mini, the corner is set to launch in September and will house FlareFlow’s vertical-drama catalogue for Thai audiences, with new titles added weekly.

“Building a sustainable short-form entertainment industry requires us to invest beyond content and into the next generation of Thai creative talent. We are pleased to partner with COL Group who shares this vision and brings deep global experience in the category. Together, we can connect education with real industry opportunities – from storytelling and production to AI-enabled creation and access to real world audiences – building stronger capabilities for Thai creators and a foundation for original Thai stories and IP to grow in Thailand and beyond,” said Patsakorn Laohrenu, director of business development of content & media group, CP Group.

“This partnership brings together the different pieces needed to grow short-form entertainment in a meaningful way, from developing the next generation of creators to localising proven stories for Thai audiences and creating new ways for those stories to reach viewers,” added Timothy Oh, general manager of COL Group and CMO of FlareFlow. “By working with CP Group across talent, content and distribution, we hope to contribute to a stronger and more sustainable short-form entertainment ecosystem in Thailand.”

Tatang sits within a larger CP and True Group consumer network in Thailand that touches telecoms, e-payments, retail and marketing, and the partners plan joint promotional efforts to boost visibility for FlareFlow titles in the market.

For COL Group, the tie-up fits into a wider international growth push, pairing its content library and production know-how with a local partner that knows the market, has an established audience and brings its own creative infrastructure.

COL Group is known as an early mover in the microdrama space across the Chinese and U.S. markets. Its FlareFlow app, one of the leading vertical drama platforms worldwide, counts more than 45 million registered users.

CP Group is one of Thailand’s biggest conglomerates and ranks among Asia’s largest enterprise groups, with operations in 23 countries covering everything from agriculture and retail to telecoms, e-wallets, tech and media. The company has invested in China since 1979 and owns True Corporation, a leading Thai telecommunications and digital technology player.

GameSquare is rebranding its gaming and esports-focused livestreaming measurement platform Stream Hatchet into Hatchet, which it describes as “the first full-service creator matching and brand marketing analytics platform built for marketers looking to engage in youth culture with an emphasis on gaming.”

As part of the revamp, Hatchet, which counts Electronic Arts and NASCAR among its clients, will creator analytics including discovery, campaign tracking and ROI measurement. The rebranded platform will include an AI “Smart Search” and add in data from sources like TikTok Live, Twitter/X and Instagram along with its existing livestreaming network measurements, which are calculated based on 10 years of insights, more than 50 million creators and over 30 platforms.

Per GameSquare, changes coming to Hatchet include:
● End-to-End operation: Data and execution in one tool that allows users to find, verify, analyze, build, and report insights all together.
● Data set expansion: Hatchet can now pull from Twitch, YouTube, Kick, TikTok and over 30 platforms. Users can narrow search by audience overlap and chat sentiment with YouTube paid-vs-organic view identifications in the work, among other new descriptors.
● AI integration: For the first time, there is no manual configuration required. With “AI Smart Search,” users can evolve from a passive search platform into an active intelligence engine. This tool can also proactively surface the right creators at the right time.
● Creator Community: Manage your entire creator roster from one place. Brief, track, and coordinate campaigns end-to-end via a single, customizable hub with no manual tracking.

The new creator marketing analytics solution aims to help brands leverage the impact of gaming on youth culture.

“What we are doing with Hatchet is truly unique. This is not a generic tool being retrofitted to gaming. It is a full-service proposition backed by the entire GameSquare ecosystem,” GameSquare CEO Justin Kenna said. “The goal here is to help brands live and thrive at the center of a core aspect of youth culture — gaming. For comparison, we are building something that gives the same type of insights as the Nielsen ratings, but for content creators and using the highest standard that exists in the market, with more options than other platforms offer.”

“Over the years Hatchet has developed powerful tools and data sets to move the industry past reactive discovery,” Hatchet director of product Alessandra Pinto said. “Brands and publishers need an extension of their team, one that is continuously learning from performance patterns, surfacing opportunities, and tuning itself to their needs. Hatchet is our vision as that true strategic partner to help brands move from outreach to activation and manage the full campaign life cycle.”

See below for more from Variety’s Q&A with Pinto about revamping Hatchet.

What is driving the retooling and expansion for Hatchet?

The creator landscape has fundamentally changed. Creators now build audiences across multiple platforms and increasingly now include gaming as well as mainstream culture. It is critical for brands to understand a creator’s full ecosystem rather than evaluate individual channels in isolation … treating those platforms as interchangeable can mean missing important differences in audience behavior and influence.

Hatchet is expanding to give brands a more complete view of how creators, audiences and internet culture intersect, helping them identify which creators matter to specific audiences, on which platforms, and why.

Can you explain how AI is used on the platform and what purpose it serves?

We designed Hatchet’s AI around real challenges brands/marketers face. Smart Search allows users to describe the creator they are looking for in plain language and translates that intent into search criteria across more than 50 million creators and 30+ platforms, while the Daily Dashboard feature personalizes insights based on each user’s needs.

Ultimately, we see AI as a tool to help narrow enormous amounts of data into relevant insights that support better decisions. At the end of the day, the goal is not to replace human judgment but help people make better-informed choices for their campaigns.

French sales company MMM Film Sales has acquired the international rights to “Agata the Writer,” starring Mia Wasikowska, which will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in the Venice Days section, in competition.

The Australian film is directed by filmmaker and artist Kuba Dorabialski, and is produced by Alex White, best known for “Babyteeth.”

It follows Agata, a Polish-Australian novelist who travels from Sydney to Sarajevo to write a war novel. As she gathers material for her book, she is challenged by locals who question her motives and her relationship to the history she is attempting to portray.

As her creative uncertainty grows, a strange mystery unfolds when a series of provocative and obscene artworks inexplicably disappear. Through Agata’s journey, the film reveals that her novel is not about the war itself, but about the quiet, human moments of resilience that persist in its shadow, leading her to a deeper understanding of storytelling and the responsibilities that come with being a storyteller.

The MMM Film Sales team said, “We were immediately drawn to ‘Agata the Writer’ for its unique voice and its fascinating reflection on how we engage with history and memory. Mia Wasikowska perfectly embodies the role of Agata, a writer returning to her home continent, seeking to understand and reconnect with the wounds of the recent past, and with the ways in which unresolved conflicts continue to echo in the present. Kuba Dorabialski has crafted a film that is both playful and thought-provoking, questioning the relationship between storytelling, identity and responsibility.”

“Agata the Writer” is a Whitefalk Films and Produktion Productions film. Principal production funding came from Screen Australia. It is financed with support from Creative Australia and the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund.

“Babyteeth,” also produced by White, had its international premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival, winning the Marcello Mastroianni Award. The film was nominated for 13 Australian Academy (AACTA) Awards winning nine, including best film, director and screenplay. In 2021 the film was nominated for a BAFTA Award for best director, won the Australian Directors Guild Award for best direction and as well as a British Independent Film Award nomination for best international film.

Dorabialski is an artist and filmmaker born in Wrocław, Poland, and currently based in Sydney, Australia. He has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally and won the John Fries Award (2017) and the Fisher Ghost Art Prize (2019). In 2021 he had his first major institutional solo exhibition at Carriageworks, a single channel long form video work Connection of the Sticks, which premiered in the FLUX: Art + Film program at the Sydney Film Festival in 2023. “Agata the Writer” is his debut feature film.

In her upcoming third feature “Brace Your Heart,” Amanda Kernell follows a survivor, not a victim. 

“We’re all different, and some people who experience really difficult things can’t recover. But there are others who survive and find there’s light on the other side,” she told Variety. 

Kernell, known for “Sámi Blood” and “Charter,” is also behind the script. 

In the story, Ejva inherits her father’s reindeer herd following his sudden death. She must grow up, quickly, with only the local leader Heaika eager to help. However, Heaika expects some things in return and isn’t happy to see Ejva fall for his cousin. 

The highly anticipated film is set to premiere at Toronto and San Sebastián. It debuts its exclusive trailer here:

In 2023, Kernell won the top award at the Co-Production Market at Haugesund’s New Nordic Films industry sidebar for the film, which was then known as “The Curse: A Love Story.” 

“After the curse of your own silence, or the curse that doesn’t allow you to speak up because you’re afraid of how people will think of you if you confront them,” she explained. 

“Then I realized: OK. I’m more interested in liberation than a curse.”

Sold by TrustNordisk, it’s produced by Eva Åkergren for Nordisk Film Production, and co-produced by Forest People, Compass Films, Invictus, Nordisk Film Production Denmark, Filmpool Nord, SVT and Film i Väst.

Elli Sara Valkeapää plays Ejva. She’s joined by Andte Gaup-Juuso and Vincent Niia.

“During casting, [Elli Sara Valkeapää] had just turned 18. I was like: ‘This is her. This is the girl I’ve written about.’ But that meant I had to change the whole film, because she speaks another Sámi language than I do,” explained Kernell. 

“I have a Sámi father and a Swedish mother, and I grew up in a village outside of Umeå. There are many strong, tough women there. As a child, I admired them, and I also feared them a little bit,” she said. 

“It seemed like they could survive anything, and maybe they had to. In this community, you have a responsibility greater than yourself.”

Just like Ejva, who suddenly needs to learn how to protect the herd and make her family proud, even when a violent attack leaves her struggling.

“This line from the title… It’s something you say to young Sámi people who are reindeer herders. You need to make your heart harder in order to survive,” she said. 

“Maybe that’s how you get through difficult things and traumas and death – and a life that’s very close to death. But it’s not the path to love.” 

Copenhagen-based sales and aggregation outlet LevelK has boarded the Norwegian psycho-thriller “Anathema” by promising directing duo Ea Johanne Sandberg and Alpha Nord.

One of 21 projects in development to be pitched today at the Nordic Co-Production Market in Haugesund, “Anathema” is being shepherded by the seasoned Janne Hjeltnes (Netflix’s “Royalteen,” “Midsummer Night”) and Anne Borgaard Sørensen (“Camino”, “Bullshit”), also credited respectively as producer and executive producer of the Venice-bound “No Paradise If You Are Killed by a Woman.”

Penned by Sandberg and Nord, “Anathema” is billed as a “visceral, unsettling exploration of repression, denial and collective madness.” The central character Dafne, lives in a valley with her mother and Bror. When he vanishes, she begins to question if she or her community is falling apart. His eventual return, drowned and dead, pushes the town into full‑scale delusion: no one admits his zombie-like state and everyone insists on celebrating his wedding, even if it means sacrificing his fiancée.

“Dafne combines the truth-telling clarity of the boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” with the reluctant awakening of Neo in “The Matrix,” said the co-directors whose graduation short “Liminal Space” was selected for the New York City Independent Film Festival in 2025.

“What excited us about the project was the fresh take on a known genre and the guts of the two young female directors to approach taboo subjects in an unconventional manner and thereby mark their debut with a clear ‘what the f***’ film which will have people do a double take,” commented Natascha Degnova, LevelK’s head of PR and marketing. She added: “This is the kind of project that fits very well into our strategy of including more genre titles to our slate, as well as of getting involved in projects before production, having a full journey and collaboration with the filmmakers from script to worldwide release.”

“Anathema” is also the first feature under Hjeltnes and Sørensen’s banner Empathitude Pictures, set up in 2025 between Oslo and Copenhagen. “It’s exactly the kind of film we want to champion: character-driven, boundary-pushing and emotionally resonant, with a strong creative vision at its core,” said the producers, adding: “What makes the project particularly exciting to us is that it represents an extraordinary Gen Z approach to storytelling and filmmaking: instinctive, genre-fluid and unafraid of breaking with convention. It is the kind of filmmaking that does not simply work within an existing cinematic language but actively pushes it forward and expands what contemporary cinema can be.”

The project’s film financing is being structured so far as a three-way co-production between Empathitude Pictures in Norway and Denmark and Junafilm in Germany, with funding from the Norwegian Film Institute. “It’s a low budget film [around $1.7 million] but it needs the right partners as we want those trailblazing Gen Z filmmakers to fulfil their vision,” the former Viaplay and The Global Ensemble Drama top executive Sørensen told Variety.

At the Norwegian Film Festival’s industry sidebar New Nordic Films, currently underway, the Empathitude Pictures co-heads are looking for further co-financiers and distributors for “Anathema” and for their overall film and series slate.

“With Anne, since launching Empathitude Pictures, we’ve been working relentlessly on our development slate, which was awarded Creative Media support this summer, so it feels like we have taken some good choices. Starting a new company these days is not easy, but we’re optimistic,” offered Hjeltnes who’s also thrilled to attend the Venice Film Festival with the world premiere – out of competition – of Halkawt Mustafa’s “No Paradise if You Are Killed by a Woman,” produced by Hene Films.  

“I have been a producer alongside Halkawt for a decade, having produced as well his previous film “Hiding Saddam Hussein” [an IDFA world premiere in 2023]. “This is a dream come true,” she said.
New Nordic Films closes Aug. 27 and the Norwegian Intl. Film Festival in Haugesund on Aug. 28.