WRITTEN BY: Annika Pham
The major Norwegian production house has merged its subsidiaries and beefed up its staff with the hiring of Int’l Emmy winning producer Vegard Stenberg Eriksen.
The major Norwegian production house has merged its subsidiaries and beefed up its staff with the hiring of Int’l Emmy winning producer Vegard Stenberg Eriksen.
To prepare for one of its busiest production years ever and changes in the market, NENT Group’s Monster has bolstered its business and streamlined its organisational structure by merging Monster Entertainment and Monster Scripted into the main group Monster.
The company’s CEO Ingvild Daae told www.nordicfilmandtvnews.com that this merger will allow for “greater synergies”. “We see that with our factual and scripted productions, there are great possibilities for synergies in financing models, with distributors and other producing partners. By functioning as one company, we will be able to offer our customers even stronger expertise in all genres.”
She continues: “In addition to the production of great entertainment formats for Norwegian broadcasters, Monster has great ambitions for the future, both within the scripted genre and in children and factual entertainment. The possibility of telling great stories is, as always, our main focus - how the stories are distributed will be secondary.”
To fulfil the group’s ambitions, Daae has just hired seasoned producer Vegard Stenberg Eriksen as new Head of Scripted, starting January 2020. The latter will join Monster from NRK where for the last 13 years, he has contributed to some of the public broadcaster’s biggest successes such as the award-winning shows Mammon, Home Ground, and most recently, NRK’s hit financial series Exit.
Håkon Briseid, former Head of Monster Scripted, will now focus on international partners and distributors, both for scripted and non-scripted content-in his new role as Executive Producer.
Meanwhile Eva Rolland Koshamn will continue as Head of Non-Scripted.
Eriksen is the fourth senior TV executive lured away from the Norwegian public broadcaster in the last couple of years with NRK’s former head of the children department Cathrine Simonsen, (Skam, ZombieLars), in charge of Monster’s children programmes since August, former NRK deputy head of drama Lasse Greve Alsos (Struggle for Life, Monster), now executive producer at Monster, and director Atle Knudsen (ZombieLars).
Former Miso Film Norway’s managing director Brede Hovland (Acquitted, Seizure) recently joined to help with the production of the international series What Happened in Oslo.
The production powerhouse behind Nobel, Young & Promising and Borderliner (2018 Nordisk Film & TV Fond Prize nominee), is now fully staffed to produce 3-5 scripted shows a year across all genres and formats, from smaller series financed locally, to high-end international co-productions of up to €20 million.
Briseid said that after two years of ‘intensive development’, several projects are ready to go into production. Looking ahead, Monster’s executive producer says that because of escalating production costs, his company will most probably increase its international co-productions on carefully-developed premium content, next to nationally-oriented projects.
Monster’s 2020 slate is the following:
Scripted
Non-Scripted