Fernando Szew on 15 Years of MarVista

As MarVista Entertainment turns 15, co-founder and CEO Fernando Szew tells World Screen about how the company has forged a successful path in a competitive marketplace.

Since its founding in 2003, MarVista Entertainment has earned a reputation as a trusted creator and provider of successful content among broadcasters and platforms across the world. Following a capital injection and the rapid growth of its development and production pipeline, the company has evolved into a full-service studio platform with vast capabilities. MarVista is now among the leading independent developers, producers and distributors of movies, series and kids’ and family content. MarVista has led the industry in innovative approaches in several key areas that have established it as a preferred partner to many major clients around the world.

WS: What were your goals when setting up MarVista 15 years ago?
SZEW: The business has changed dramatically over the years, and we’ve continued to adapt and grow steadily. The goal in setting up the company was to turn my father’s sales agency, Whamo Entertainment, into a venture that would establish a growing asset base by expanding its library of controlled content and to be a key supplier of great programming to the world. I was very fortunate to have the stars align when, in 2003, we partnered with Michael Jacobs and George Port and launched with that vision a new entity rebranded as MarVista Entertainment. Michael, George and my father have all since made successful exits and all remain trustworthy advisors to me. I now lead an incredible team of diverse and energetic individuals who inspire me to continue to grow on that vision. From our early days as a quasi-startup to today, it’s been a great ride, and we’re by no means close to the finish line.

WS: What strategies did you put in place to achieve those goals?
SZEW: It was about taking an in-depth look at the relationships that we had and where we could excel. As founders, we appreciated each other’s strengths and how we could convert those into core competencies for the betterment of the organization. Although those operating partners are no longer active, the DNA we created is still here, even as we have evolved into a much larger company with many more tentacles and capabilities. From day one, our strategy involved caring for the creative and being true to our word when it came to delivering the type of content that we were committing to—and at the same time, retaining an entrepreneurial spirit, a can-do attitude, and being focused on being valuable partners to broadcasters and platforms.

WS: Tell us about MarVista’s “buyer-first” approach to both clients and content development.
SZEW: At an early age going to trade conventions, I saw so much content being created that didn’t have a purpose in the marketplace. I didn’t have the luxury of not being intentional, so we immediately became a solution-oriented company. We actively listened to key clients to understand what their needs were and if and how we could respond to them. At the time, for many of our clients and certain slots they were attempting to fill, we found our niche in meeting the demand for stories geared toward women, stories for families and tween/teen coming-of-age stories. We were able to better refine the type of creative material that we were seeking. Over time, as we developed breadth and scope to our operation and many more capabilities, we have focused on being able to respond to different needs from different clients. We can now amplify at the different points of the content creation and distribution value chain—from early development to creative production to full production to financing to distribution and monetization. Being focused on the “buyers” does not mean that we are being reactive—actually it makes us more proactive as we aim to be solution-oriented and anticipate needs. This has led to us being recognized as an efficient and effective company with which to partner.

WS: Tell us about the team and the structure you have in place to meet the challenges of the current marketplace.
SZEW: This has been the greatest joy in my career—building an incredible team, seeing talent flourish and careers catapulted for working at or collaborating with MarVista. When we raised capital in 2011 from an investor group led by Brian N. Sheth, the premise was to be able to create a more scalable model for the company we could become. Brian and I were very aligned and he has been incredibly supportive. We have invested in people, systems and resources along the value chain I mentioned, and now, after significantly upgrading our capabilities, we are leveraging our scalability for further growth. We talk about the “smarts” of our business but focus persistently on the “health” of it with equal or more importance.  As we think about what we do and how we will continue to grow the business, we never lose sight of how we behave as a team and the culture that we cultivate.  There’s nothing greater or more important than the team. I believe that in large part because of our culture, we have been able to develop a team and attract new members who have lots of different capabilities that contribute to making us a significant and a best-in-class partner in the creation and distribution of content that is seen by audiences around the globe.

WS: What creative alliances are you entering into in the U.S.?
SZEW: We’ve always been very friendly to partnerships, both from a business and a creative perspective. One example is when we “answered the call” from Will Ferrell who wanted to be the lead in a “Lifetime-type” of movie along with Kristen Wiig. Together we conceived A Deadly Adoption (pardon the pun), which was a successful pop-culture moment for all involved. We have some formal and informal partnerships with great talent that we have continued to support and collaborate with. Our relationship with Company X/SpectreVision, Elijah Wood’s company, is a creative partnership that fits the bill of being solution-oriented. Elijah and his partners are great creative visionaries, and we complement them with an ability to execute on production, financing and the go-to-market strategy. We’ve had a good level of success with the first two movies, premiering the first one at Sundance and the second one at the Tribeca Film Festival, following with distribution plans to maximize the audience for each film.

Another relationship that is very dear to my heart is our partnership with Debby Ryan, which originated with our friends at the Disney Channel. We seized on the moment when she was a rising star and provided a vehicle where she excelled and became a major talent on Disney Channels around the world. The first movie, 16 Wishes, cemented her as a true lead actress and from there on we have made more movies with her, including Radio Rebel and Rip Tide. She also partnered with us to executive produce Jessica Darling’s It List, and we are currently developing another project with her.

WS: How has the expansion into scripted drama series progressed since you did Rebel with John Singleton?
SZEW: This is a very telling story of MarVista as an agile independent studio that is able to work with someone who had traditionally not worked with independents. John is an Emmy- and Academy Award-nominated director, and we were very fortunate that we were able to align ourselves with him and the team to produce the original and successful prime-time drama series Rebel for BET.

We are also very excited to be in the young adult drama space with our new comedy series Best.Worst.Weekend.Ever. with Netflix. We were able to leverage our great development team and relationships to bring to Netflix a unique project, aligned with a seasoned comedy creative force in Jeremy Garelick, who wrote The Break-Up and wrote and directed The Wedding Ringer.  Jeremy serves as director, showrunner and executive producer.

Internationally, we recently partnered with Arnie Zipursky, a longtime friend and well-respected colleague, to form Neshama Entertainment to give us the opportunity to expand into Canada. More news will be coming out of that venture as we create greater relationships within the Canadian creative community.

Additionally, we recently formed a joint venture with Hemisphere Media Group. They acquired the entity we had in Argentina with our partner Ariel Tobi (Snap TV) and together we have formed a partnership to create content for the Latin American marketplace, as well as to bring IP from Latin America to a global audience.

WS: How do you craft a route-to-market strategy for any given title?
SZEW: We don’t take a one-size-fits-all strategy to constructing a go-to-market plan. Even with our vast volume, we curate each piece of content to understand its salient points for its intended core audience and develop a sales plan and collateral marketing material for each project. We have a cross-departmental team that collaborates to determine this positioning and the best go-to-market strategy.

WS: What other growth priorities are you focusing on?
SZEW: It’s a phenomenal time for MarVista and the industry. We feel very fortunate to have positioned ourselves as we have in this very moment when there is an explosion of content demand all over the world. In the past couple of years, we have produced and/or co-produced approximately 50 movies per year, and our goal is to increase that pipeline significantly.  We are also working with some exciting higher profile, talent-driven movies both for multiplatform distribution and also straight for broadcast. We are in the midst of steadily increasing our scripted series business and are very eager to bear the fruits of Neshama in Canada and our joint venture with Hemisphere.

WS: You grew up in this industry. What do you love most about it?
SZEW: I love that I’m still growing up in it! About two years ago I put together a presentation for our executive team and then rolled it out to the whole company.  The first question I answered was, “Why do we [as an organization] exist?” and the answer was and will always be, “To create opportunities to make the world a smaller place.” I love the global aspect of our industry and the growing global demand for content; there’s great storytelling coming from all over the world and reaching audiences everywhere. And I love the fact that we’re able to provide a lot of opportunities for people to watch content and interact with content and be entertained.