Ilkkas Creative Studio partners with Finnish publisher WSOY for international stories

SERIES MANIA: Ilkkas’ Creative Studio (ICS), the Tampere-based prodco that launched in September last year, has partnered with Finnish publishing house WSOY to develop Finnish scripted content for international audiences.

The deal was announced on the first day of Series Mania in Lille by ICS’s CEO Ilkka Rahkonen and creative director Ilkka Hynninen, and WSOY’s CEO Timo Julkunen.

The WSOY group, which includes the Tammi, Readme, Bazar, Docendo, Crime Time, Johnny Kniga, Minerva and Kosmos imprints, will initially work on several key projects with the producer inviting authors to have a stake in the development of the stories for screen.

ICS is now starting a round of negotiations with international partners on the jointly selected projects.

“ICS’s way of structuring the international market situation with knowledge-based management and its vision of cooperation that extends beyond individual works fits well with WSOY’s strategy of generating added value for the writers as a publisher,” said Julkunen.

Hynninen added: “The goal of this agreement ultimately is to maximise the success of Finnish stories and take them around the world. Together with the management of WSOY, instead of optioning individual books, we want to build a strategic view around the current and future works and plan how to conceptualise and squeeze the best possible content out of them.”