Red Arrow Seals LatAm Scripted-Format Deal

Red Arrow International’s TF1 crime drama Falco, based on The Last Cop, is set to be remade for the Latin American market.

Dynamo and Spiral International will produce the new version, which will consist of 15 hour-long episodes, launching with a feature-length pilot. Mexican filmmaker, director and screenwriter Ernesto Contreras will serve as showrunner and director. Casting and broadcast outlets will be announced in due course. The show will go into production in Mexico City this month.

Falco, which has run for five seasons on TF1, is focused on a detective who goes into a coma in 1994 after being shot and doesn’t wake up until present day. The German series The Last Cop (Der Letzte Bulle) is SAT.1’s most successful crime series ever. It has also been formatted for Channel 5 in Russia, Hulu and Nippon TV in Japan, and in the Czech Republic and Estonia.

Henrik Pabst, managing director of Red Arrow International, said, “Falco is a powerful and poignant story about a detective’s determination to hunt down his assailant, find his family, and get his life back on track. Ernesto Contreras is a master filmmaker and we could not be more thrilled to be working with Dynamo and Spiral International to see Falco brought to life in Spanish.”

Diego Ramírez Schrempp, partner at Dynamo, noted, “We are very happy to be partnering with Red Arrow International and Spiral to bring this great internationally acclaimed format to Latin American audiences. When adapting the scripts we were careful in keeping the unique strength of the original series, while adding a rich Latin American context and texture to the story and characters. I have no doubt that Falco will be another powerful Dynamo product, very much in line with our international premium content strategy.”

Contreras added, “Falco will be an exciting cinematic experience across 15 episodes, where we will establish an expressive and stylized language, including the nostalgic element of the ’90s (when Falco practically ceases to exist), and where the primary objective will be to create a special visual, audible and emotional universe to tell our story.”

Red Arrow International will distribute the Latin American production worldwide.