AGC’s Stuart Ford On TV, Film Sales, Saudi Arabia & ‘Tindler Swindler’

EXCLUSIVE: As we revealed on the eve of the Cannes market, indie film stalwart Stuart Ford and longtime business partner Miguel Palos of AGC Studios have re-upped their deals at the company and are lining up what they describe as the company’s “most prolific and profitable year so far”. The CEO and COO have worked together across two companies for the best part of two decades, weathering global financial crises, the streaming wars, Covid, union strikes, and large-scale consolidation. Ford is the largest shareholder in AGC Studios but founding investors remain ImageNation (out of Abu Dhabi), Latin American investment fund Media Net and Silicon Valley private equity investor Greg Clark.

AGC Television is currently shooting Embassy, the geo-political action thriller series starring Anna Kendrick, Sam Heughan and J.K. Simmons, and also Beatles biopic series Hamburg Days. The firm recently produced MGM+ mystery thriller series Vanished, starring Kaley Cuoco and Sam Claflin. In film, Lauren Miller Rogen’s Babies starring Anna Kendrick and Seth Rogen is in post, as is Ellie Foumbi’s erotic thriller Fleur starring Halle Berry. The company is in pre-production on J Blakeson’s Sweat with Ana de Armas.

We checked in with Ford and Palos to discuss their ongoing push into TV, film sales challenges, the Middle East, AI, and the secret to a long-standing business partnership.

DEADLINE: You recently re-upped at AGC, but it’s your company. How does a re-up work in that context?

STUART FORD: It’s a collective board decision. Like any well-run business, the senior management, whether they are a shareholder or not, whether they’re a founder or not, need to remain accountable to the shareholders, so it’s just a healthy corporate governance. I am the biggest shareholder, but in terms of my willingness and suitability to lead the company as CEO, and likewise Miguel as COO, we’re very happy to assess on a regular basis with our partners whether we are the best guys for the job, and whether we’re being remunerated proportionately to our performance in running the business. I think we are at the precipice of more change in the industry and we’re very excited to lead AGC into that.

DEADLINE: What has been secret to long business partnership between you both?

MIGUEL PALOS: It’s very complementary skill-sets but also compatible personalities. We both laugh very easily at the day to day absurdities of Hollywood. And we both have a similar sort of rhythm. We’re both inveterate deal makers and very hard workers. Whether it’s the easy or complex situations, we tend to find ourselves navigating them with the same speed and decisiveness.

DEADLINE: You’ve said 2026 will be the company’s most profitable so far. How so?

FORD: We’ve had more going on in the last 18 months than at any stage before, and we have more movies and shows delivering and that we get paid for than ever before. We’ve always wanted to build a diverse content studio and it’s been hard work, and some aspects of that have taken longer than maybe we would have liked, but we’re now an active player in film, TV, documentaries and factual. We have our first big-budget competition format show in pre-production with Netflix, which is going into production in a few months. Financing scripted TV in a similar way to how independent film has traditionally been done is relatively new and I think we’ve found our rhythm there.

PALOS: At the top of the year, we realized that in 2026 we were going to have 20+ active film and TV projects, active meaning in production, in post production or in release. That’s a sizeable output for a company that’s never gone above 40 people as a head count in eight years.

DEADLINE: And that bullish balance sheet projection is based on your continued move into TV?

FORD: The game show is a commission, which is good for cash flow, but we don’t have the ownership. Scripted TV has presented some real upside for us, especially in the international arena where the streamer slowdown has left a lot of great projects and a lot of great talent looking for solutions. Traditional free TV and pay-TV broadcasters have a big appetite for premium shows, but are not currently financing those shows. So, as a well-capitalized U.S. partner with appetite to take risk, that plays well with international partners both culturally and commercially. There’s a whole reservoir of shows that we’re currently tapping into and on which we’re taking genuine financial risk, but we’re making these shows happen. And when you do that, that can open up significant margins in success. We’ve enjoyed some real success in the last two or three years, and that is definitely a business model that is attractive to us, and if I’m being blunt, provides something of a counterweight to the slightly more hit and miss nature of independent film financing right now.

DEADLINE: Who is steering your TV drive?

FORD: Lourdes Diaz has built that division over a long period for us but for personal reasons decided to segue to a producer deal with us at the top of the year. In some ways, she’s still the de facto head of TV because frankly she’s got her fingers on everything we’re doing. But we are likely going to announce a formal successor to her in the next few months.

DEADLINE: You teased a Tinder Swindler adjacent documentary. Hasn’t there been talk of a Tinder Swindler scripted drama series or movie too?

FORD: [Laughs] There may be a scripted TV series spin off in the works. I can’t say more than that or who it’s with.

DEADLINE: At the Cannes market, you’re launching sales on Open AI-produced family animated movie Critterz. Are you concerned about any potential backlash there?

FORD: Critterz has a human director, human writers, human artists, human character design, human world design, and human actor voices. The AI creates the animation and it does so quickly. This is a $30M movie that would have been a $100M movie without AI. There are massive savings of cost and time. But all of the key creative contributions are by humans. There is already significant studio and streamer interest in this project. We believe that this is going to create something of a template for how Hollywood animation can embrace AI animation tools in a way that creates huge value for everybody without crossing the boundaries of replacing humans. The Los Angeles Times recently asked whether this movie heralded “AI’s Toy Story moment”. We believe it does.

DEADLINE: For a number of years you were known for bringing big budget — $80M-100M — projects to market. Generally as sales titles. You aren’t doing that much now. Neither is the market, but they’re still out there. What has changed?

FORD: I would say those projects, in the current economic climate of the independent film marketplace, are no longer viable. You will see Lionsgate and maybe one or two others drop those projects into the market, but the types of projects we used to sell in that range, backed by private investment, the numbers don’t stack up on those, especially since Chinese and Russian money has largely gone away.

DEADLINE: How challenging is it in Asia now in terms of sales?

FORD: Asia is very challenging and has been for ten years for a variety of reasons. Audiences have gravitated away from American films, particularly American independent films. Asian buyers across the whole region used to be a very reliable mainstay of the foreign pre-sales business, but they are now highly elusive. China has largely disappeared from the landscape.

DEADLINE: While not necessarily a help for pre-sales, the Middle East has become a major source of entertainment and media industry finance. You know the region pretty well given your investors from the region and projects you’ve worked on. There has been a lot of talk recently about Saudi Arabia retrenching from sports. Do you see the country retreating from the entertainment and media business?

FORD: I do not. I’m active in the Gulf region and have close relationships with many of the bigger players in Saudi and UAE and I think the overriding strategy of these Gulf States is to build and structure the new tiers in their economy and to generationally encourage and create a creative class, and at the same time to hopefully attract the best of breed collaborators from around the world to come and make movies there. I don’t think that is going to change anytime soon. Whether their execution of that bigger strategic plan involves the same level of investment in international remains to be seen.

DEADLINE: Some have asked whether the experience of Desert Warrior may dampen Saudi Arabia’s film interests. What did you learn from that experience?

FORD: Desert Warrior is an outlier. No other company or country across the region has taken that big a swing and invested so heavily in one production, effectively, as a showcase for their capabilities. But the Gulf States are too savvy now and too well advised and sophisticated for anyone to think of them as dumb money. Desert Warrior had a very specific strategic rationale for broadcaster MBC. Obviously, the film’s performance commercially is nowhere near what they would have hoped at the outset, but it did actually achieve a number of their goals. Those goals aren’t necessarily the same goals sought in the U.S. They built an entire movie movie studio infrastructure as part of that film and they educated and trained hundreds, if not thousands, of local crew in how to make a big film. They learned an awful lot and in the context of the growth strategy of that region, learning is every bit as important as generating box office returns.

Clearly the audience reaction wasn’t what was sought, but it would be a mistake to say Desert Warrior was a total failure for MBC. When we boarded the project five years ago the film made great sense. As has been reported, there were a series of unforeseeable circumstances that unfortunately tilted the scales heavily against the project being a financial success. None of those were to do with us, I should say. I think MBC knew the leap of faith they were taking.

DEADLINE: When do you think we’ll see Babies and Fleur?

FORD: Those are fall festival contenders. We also have Beatles TV series Hamburg Days in production, which as a proud Liverpudlian I’m very excited about. There’s a lot of interest in that. And Ana de Armas’ film Sweat is due to shoot later this year.

DEADLINE: Fair to say we won’t see another season of Roland Emmerich’s big-budget swords and sandals drama Those About To Die?

FORD: Probably not. We are hugely proud of the show. It was a massive hit internationally, but it did not perform well enough on Peacock to justify the very significant production cost for a second season, which is a great shame.

DEADLINE: You’ve been outspoken in the past about the challenge posed by the streaming model to the indie film business. Do you view streamers as friend or foe?

FORD: Longevity is incredibly hard to hold on to in this business. It boils down to business philosophy. Our relationships with the streamers is an important part of that.

PALOS: Over 20 years now, we’ve managed to, for the most part, successfully steer a line between embracing risk and repeatedly backing projects and backing talent that we believe in. We have a reputation as calculated risk takers, and in a very disciplined manner we’ve stuck to sound risk mitigation practices.

FORD: We’ve always had a powerful in house sales capacity. Miguel can take the credit for us being astute at using debt financing to offset risk, and we’ve always been very fluid in splitting equity risk with well chosen capital partners. Now, that might all sound like just common sense and relatively straightforward to achieve. But I think the fact that we’ve stayed at or near the top of this topsy turvy business for almost two decades, to me, suggests that we’ve been unusually good at maintaining that discipline. We’ve maintained that discipline with genuine passion and creative appetite and managed to make the streamers our partners and not let them become our paymasters.