BERLIN -- More than 800 German celebrities crowded the red carpet for the recent premiere of "March of Millions," likely to be one of the most expensive Teutonic pics of the year.
No, it's not a bigscreen feature -- the $14 million budget "March" is a TV movie, which garnered superb ratings of 11 million (29% share) for pubcaster ARD early last week.
Nowadays preems for made-for-TV pics are often more elaborate than those for most cinema productions, a telling illustration of the growing clout of mini-series and TV event films.
These projects frequently have budgets of at least $7 million, nearly three times the $2.4 million it cost to make Germany's foreign-language Oscar winner "The Lives of Others."
It is a testament to the rising quality of made-fors, often financed by deep-pocketed pubcasters ARD and ZDF, that they are being sold around the world and sometimes even end up in cinemas abroad.
"Thank God we've got such a strong system of public funding for TV films in Germany," says Jan Mojto, topper of Eos Entertainment, calling the public financing unrivaled worldwide. He co-produced "March" with Nico Hofmann and teamWorx.
While the sound of "made-for-TV film" or "mini-series" might have a slightly inferior ring to English ears, a "TV Spielfilm" as they are called in German is anything but a poor cousin.
"The goal is to make TV films of a quality similar to cinema productions," says Mojto. "And with that high quality, we're also able to sell them abroad and recover some of the costs."
By comparison, very few Teutonic theatrical releases do well outside Germany, Austria and Switzerland, making the chance of recouping even a modest budget risky. Notable exceptions include "Downfall," "Good Bye, Lenin," "Run Lola Run" and now "The Lives of Others."
"If you add up all the German-language territories it's still only a potential market of 100 million people," says Juergen Schau, who runs his own Berlin production company and was topper at Columbia Tri-Star in Germany when it made several German-language pics.
"It's a decent size market but it's still prudent to keep production costs down. There is interest in German films from abroad but because of the language barriers, it's limited."
"March," a fictional drama set against the backdrop of the 12 million Germans forced to flee the Red Army at the end of World War II, stars 40-year-old thesp Maria Furtwaengler as a fictional East Prussian aristocrat torn between two men as she leads refugees West.
Portraying Germans as victims of atrocities, pic touched a nerve with auds, where German suffering was long suppressed due to guilt over the war. It was the most-watched TV pic of the year.
Last year's No. 1 TV pic with 12 million viewers was "Dresden," also by Hofmann and EOS, about the Allied firebombing near the end of the war. It tackled a similar theme -- Germans as war victims -- and had a woman at the center torn between two men.
ZDF pic was sold to 95 countries and made it into cinemas in Japan and Greece.
An earlier teamWorx/Mojto miniseries production "The Tunnel" was also sold around the world and had a cinema release in the U.S., Japan, France and across Eastern Europe.
"There's so much rich material in Germany to draw from," says Mojto, a Slovak native. "There's so much drama, from Hitler's totalitarianism, to the Cold War, the division. There's so much stuff that lends itself to great epic TV films, and the world outside is interested too."
Mojto says the trend toward big TV event films, which have in recent years drawn reliably high ratings, has helped boost financing.
"With a budget of about e5 million ($7 million) per 90 minutes, you're at a level similar or even above comparable cinema productions and you can certainly make a film to meet international standards with funding of that dimension," he says.
Last month ZDF aired a big-budget Dieter Wedel pic "Mein Alter Freund Fritz" that pulled in about 5 million viewers; in January some 9 million tuned into another ZDF production, the $14 million three-parter "Afrika Mon Amour."
"It's quite scary to me at times the incredible sums that are needed for TV event films," says ZDF programming topper Thomas Bellut. "But they are truly successful, they fit the network profile and, unlike a big show, the films can be rebroadcast later on."
Bellut says the fact that high quality pics can often be sold abroad has taken away some of his angst. The web, which battles ARD each year for ratings though they both trail RTL slightly in the 14-49 target, spends about $394 million annually on fiction and about $33 million to produce the big film highlights.
"The overseas sales have become an important factor in the calculation," says Bellut, who was delighted by "Dresden's" success outside Germany.
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