Damien Couvreur, director of French original series at Netflix spoke recently about the exciting projects Netflix France has and will be delivering and shared the news of the cancellation of La Révolution 

The interview was carried in French on the AlloCiné site — we apologise for any errors in translation. We also apologise to any French speakers for our title!

It’s clearly been an exciting time to be producing new content for a French audience (and beyond), and the most recent result of this work is the release of stylish new series Lupin. Couvreur shares the following statistics:

We launched Lupine last Friday, and this series produced by Gaumont and directed for  Louis Leterrier with  Omar Sy embodies a new creative chapter for our French series. And I can already confirm that it is a great success, the series is placed at the top of the top 10 in dozens of countries across Europe and the world. It is even the first French creation to reach first place in our Top 10 in the United States. Cock-a-doodle Doo!

It’s great news for a show with a real presence on screen, and we’re so far relishing it. It’s not all good news though, another French show we’ve also started watching is La Révolution. It’s an intriguing alternate history take on French History, but, as the interview reveals, it’s been cancelled, even though it: attracted many members beyond France. For us, this is proof that France, its history and its heritage, can interest an international audience. However, we are not going to renew the series for a second season, because although it has aroused curiosity, the public did not find what they wanted.

Reading between the lines we suspect a lot of subscribers (and we fall into that group) have started watching, then become distracted. We understand Netflix looks hard at how far through a series viewers get, and how long it takes them to watch overall.

The whole interview is worth a read (in French here, so use your favourite auto-translate) and to us it gives more insight into how Netflix is growing in Europe and bringing a diverse range of content to it’s audience. As we’ve said a few times recently, it’s an interesting time in a still-developing market.