Will a gritty reboot of Breakfast at Tiffany’s be coming soon to your favorite streamer?
LVMH has started 22 Montaigne Entertainment, a division that will develop television and film ideas for its stable of 75 brands.
In conjunction with brand content consultancy Superconnector Studios, the new LVMH entity will try to find the right match between LVMH’s brands and entertainment creators, producers, and distributors. The luxury behemoth may co-develop, coproduce, and co-finance certain properties.
22 Montaigne Entertainment will be overseen by a committee of LVMH executives, including Antoine Arnault, the head of LVMH Image and Environment (and son of LVMH’s founder Bernard), and Anish Melwani, chairman of LVMH North America.
The division will be modeled after Nike’s Waffle Iron Entertainment, which develops sports-oriented programming for the sneaker brand, Melwani told Deadline.
“This isn’t LVMH coming to Hollywood with a big checkbook to say, ‘We’re going to go make movies,’” he said. “That’s not the intention. What we are really bringing is access to our IP, a place for great storytellers interested in that level of authenticity. LVMH is a very strange organization compared to any other organization I’ve ever worked with, in the sense that our maisons compete with each other, and we work very hard to keep their identities independent. and we give them a lot of autonomy.”
Melwani said 22 Montaigne—named after the Paris address of LVMH’s headquarters—will serve as an “organizing vehicle” to funnel projects to its brands. So if, for example, producers want to get ahold of someone from Tiffany, they’ll know who to reach out to.
“All the creative decisions, even the decision to participate or not, will stay with our maisons because we incentivize them and we structure it so that they are the keepers of their maison’s DNA and heritage and IP,” he said in the Deadline article.
A statement from LVMH cited the Inside the Dream docuseries, which featured segments on LVMH brands Dior and Bulgari, as a possible type of project for 22 Montaigne.
“I’m actually not sure we are the best ones to judge what the best yarns are, because we love our brands,” Melwani told Deadline. “If I brought you to one of our maisons and you sat for an hour with the CEO, or even better the archivist—because most of our brands have an archivist—forget an hour, you’d spend a whole day, and they’ll tell you a million stories.”
(Photo courtesy of LVMH)
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