Pokeepsie CEO Carolina Bang says the Culpables trilogy spent three years as a project no buyer wanted. Prime Video eventually greenlit the films, and the streamer now counts more than 100 million viewers across the three YA adaptations.
Speaking at the IberSeries conference in Madrid, Bang described how hard the young adult category was before it became a streaming staple.
“I spent three years trying to sell Culpables. Nobody wanted it at the very beginning, trust me.”
Pokeepsie’s newest Prime Video title, Drawn Together (Enfrentados), also opened at the top of the streamer’s chart.
Why the early bet matters
The Culpables films adapted Mercedes Ron’s books with Nicole Wallace and Gabriel Guevara. Their success arrived before YA became a crowded slate, giving Prime Video an early position in a category now common across platforms. For entertainment planners, the sequence is the useful part: a project can look like an obvious hit after the fact, but someone still had to commit when the genre was unproven.
For platforms and producers, the signal is to measure direct audience demand rather than use genre precedent as a proxy. Spain has since become a hotspot for YA productions, and Pokeepsie has continued in the lane.
Banijay’s scripted read after All3Media
Steve Matthews, Head of Scripted, Creative at Banijay Entertainment, used the same stage to address the All3Media merger. He said he has no concerns about the deal’s effect on creativity: “The answer is no. I don’t have any concerns at all about this at Banijay because I don’t think anything changes.”
Matthews acknowledged a contracting scripted market and framed it as an editing function for the industry. Good shows will still get made, he argued, while shows manufactured only to be commercial will struggle. His instruction to creators was direct: love your show.
What to do with this
- Do not wait for category consensus before backing a project; early conviction can define a genre.
- Use fan-community demand as evidence when the broad market is not ready.
- Read scripted contraction as a quality filter, not only a volume loss.
For ScreenStat readers, the takeaway is about timing: Culpables became a global streaming property because Prime Video accepted a risk other buyers declined for three years.
Source: Deadline
