The crisis around the film ‘Bergen’: who got the screening rights?

Bergen

International digital platforms are increasingly active in the Turkish media market, not hesitating to intercept promising projects from each other. This time the subject of dispute was the rights to screen the popular film “Bergen” starring Farah Zeynep Abdullah.

Turkey’s most successful film of 2022, “Bergen”, attracted 5 million 461 thousand viewers to cinemas and earned 159 million TL. As film critics admit, the movie actually revived Turkey’s film industry, which was severely affected by the pandemic, becoming the 8th most popular film at the Turkish box office of all time.

The Turkish press has reported that a preliminary agreement has been reached to sell the film on the Disney Plus digital platform for $800,000 (13 million TL). However, the producers of Orchestra Content demanded that the contract be raised to $1.7 million. Disney’s management refused to compromise.

As a result, Amazon Prime bought the film. The cost of the transaction is $1.5 million (approximately 25 million TL). The digital platform is already present in the Turkish market, but previously positioned itself only as a bonus to the media giant’s fast delivery system. It seems that its priorities have changed, and they started to buy the Turkish movies.