“Gun on set! Gun on set! Everyone, gun on set!” 

It’s April, 2022 and we’re in MMC Studios in Cologne for the shooting of European conspiracy thriller Operation Napoleon. It’s 5,000 miles and six months distant from the events of Oct. 2021 on the New Mexico set of Rust, when Alec Baldwin, discharged a live round from a revolver used as a prop gun killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. But the warning still chills. 

Not that anyone here seems bothered. 

Director Óskar Þór Axelsson is too busy setting up what will be the climax of Operation Napoleon: as a team of investigators prepare to board an old German World War II plane that has recently emerged from one of Iceland’s largest glaciers. The plane is at the center of the film, and the best-selling novel it’s based on, by Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indriðason. Grainy satellite footage of the German bomber, which crashed into the ice in 1945, reveals that both German and American officers are among the dead on board. The US military has tried to cordon off the area to keep the locals out but Kristin, young Icelandic lawyer, decides to dig deeper and gets drawn into an international conspiracy involving the CIA, old Nazis and some opportunistic criminals. 

Icelandic newcomer Vivian Ólafsdóttir (It Hatched) stars as Kristin alongside an international cast including Game of Thrones’ Iain Glen, Riviera and Cheaters actor Jack Fox and German star Wotan Wilke Möhring (Valkyrie, Pandorum).

The story couldn’t be farther away from that of Rust, an American Neo-Western featuring Baldwin as a Kansas outlaw on the run with this thirteen-year-old grandson from a U.S. Marshal (played by Supernatural’s Jensen Ackles). But both Rust and Operation Napoleon can be seen two attempts to solve one of the biggest challenges in indie filmmaking at the moment: how do you make an action movie on a budget that can sell to the international market?  

As production costs rise —inflation, COVID protocols, and salary demands from booked-solid talent and crew are swelling indie film budgets worldwide—it’s becoming increasingly difficult for companies to balance the demands of buyers, who want films that look and feel studio-sized, with the financial realities of an independent market where revenues, particularly theatrical, continue to fall.

Rust shot in New Mexico to take advantage of state tax credits and used complex financing models to attract investors. Following the shooting incident, there have been allegations that the producers ignored industry-wide norms and cut corners of safety to stretch the film’s shoestring budget. The film pre-sold to some international territories, largely off of Baldwin’s name, but its future remains uncertain. 

Operation Napoleon took a different, more European, approach. To finance the $7 million feature, the film’s co-producers, Iceland’s Sagafilm —producers of 2021 drama Wolka and hit Icelandic TV series Stella Blómkvist and The Minister—and German indie Splendid Film, picked up shooting subsidies from regional funds in Iceland, Scandinavia and Germany and secured pre-sale deals with Sam Films in Iceland and with German public broadcaster ZDF, for local free-TV rights. Splendid will release the film themselves in Germany early next year. 

Exteriors where all shot on location in Iceland. 

“We were right on the Langjökull glacier, which was…quite something,” notes Glen, with typical British understatement. 

For the interiors, Sagafilm and Splendid came to MMC in Cologne and the studios’ production arm, MMC Fiction, came on board as a co-producer. Beta Film, who control 25 percent of Sagafilm, are selling the project worldwide at AFM. 

“With our set up here, we can handle any budget film up to $25 million,” says MMC Studios CEO Jens Wolf. Citing local tax credits and other regional benefits, he notes that MMC “can produce the same quality as in the US much more cheaply.” 

And, though Wolf is too polite to mention it, much more safely than is often the case in by-the-seat-of-your-pants operations in the US. 

Mid-budget genre films, of the sort in high demand at the AFM, are particularly suited to the MMC model. XYZ Films, together with Cologne production house Augenschein, used a similar financing structure to bankroll Joe Penna’s sci-fi feature Stowaway, starring Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim, Toni Collette and Shamier Anderson, which shot at MMC in 2021, and was released on Netflix. Another example is Patrick Vollrath’s skyjacking thriller 7500, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which Augenschein and FilmNation produced and which went out on Amazon stateside; or Yuval Adler’s spy thriller The Operative starring Diane Kruger and Martin Freeman, produced by Black Bear Pictures, among others, together with Cologne’s Little Shark Entertainment, and which Vertical Entertainment released in the U.S.. 

US and international producers are also finding a new crop of eager collaborators in the form of European distributors like Splendid, who, seeing major market titles snatched up early in worldwide streaming deals, are increasingly expanding into production as a means of securing films for their release slates. 

“For us, Operation Napoleon, based on a book that was a bestseller in Germany, with an international star like  Iain Glen and a big German name in Wotan [Wilke Möhring], is a major theatrical release [in Germany]” notes Splendid CEO Dirk Schweitzer. “And as a producer, we participate in the international revenues, whether it’s theatrical or VOD or whatever in each territory.” 

The nearly insatiable appetite of streaming platforms for easy-to-market genre fare featuring recognisable talent means projects like Operation Napoleon have a bright future.

“In a way, the dynamic online resembles the old straight-to-video market,” says Schweitzer. “We’re seeing a real boom in demand for the kind of action and genre movies we’ve always specialised in.” 

But mid-budget action is a tough sell theatrically, with the cost of P&A often restrictively expensive.  With shooting costs climbing and online revenues still well below what action titles earned in the heyday of the video market in the 1980s and 90s, clever financing, combined with safe and dependable production, is the key to making the numbers work.

Operation Napoleon, at least, has come off without a hitch. Currently in post, the film is set to bow in Iceland in January, in Germany in March and, most likely, soon after will be coming to video platform near you. 

This story first appeared in The Hollywood Reporter’s Nov. 3 daily issue at the American Film Market.