Netflix Cuts Loom Over Rome's MIA Market as Its 12th Edition Closes
Netflix's latest job cuts were the main talking point at Rome's MIA Market, which closed on Friday after its 12th edition. Variety reported that the streaming giant has cut 1,000 employees, around 6% of its workforce. Among those affected were chief content officer Bela Bajaria and head of film Dan Lin.
Lin's firing was announced on Monday, hours before industry guests gathered for an opening reception at Palazzo Barberini, the historic home of the market. Many of those in the room were there to do business, so the news reached them fast.
MIA is a meeting place for the film and television trade. Producers pitch projects, buyers look for shows and films to sell in their own countries, and financiers look for money. This year's edition ran from 19 to 23 October, and Gaia Tridente is the market's head.
The market usually sits in Palazzo Barberini and the nearby Cinema Barberini. This year it spread across several venues along Via Veneto, a well-known street in central Rome. The dates also moved to run alongside the Rome Film Festival and Alice nella Città, a separate festival that runs in parallel with it.
Among the executives who attended were Banijay Entertainment chief executive Marco Bassetti, Studiocanal chief executive Anna Marsh and Bad Wolf chief executive Jane Tranter. Filmmakers Edward Berger and Asif Kapadia were also on the guest list. Marsh spoke at a session on 22 October about the challenges facing the European audiovisual industry, which covers film, TV and streaming.
The programme added several new pieces. A new gap-financing market for animation series was introduced. Gap financing is money that covers the shortfall between what a project has already raised and what it needs to be finished. A new strand looked at financial tools for European producers, including the role of equity capital, which is money invested in exchange for a share of a project's ownership. MIA also launched a European Investment Hub, according to Screen Daily.
The backdrop is a tougher year for Italian production. A report on Italian audiovisual investment, covered by Deadline, found that Italian scripted TV and streaming was the hardest-hit area, down €122 million. Overall Italian fiction production came in at €740 million, down 5.5%. That is a sharp turn from 2024, when Variety reported that Italy's film and TV market had almost doubled over the previous five years.
For the people behind the screen, the stakes are concrete. A scripted drama can mean a crew of hundreds, a writers' room and months of work. When funding shrinks, some of those projects get finished and some do not. Funding tools like the new strands at MIA are one attempt to fill that gap, though nobody at the market has yet said how many projects they will carry.
