Pathé and Merit France have partnered with Vendôme Pictures to launch Emotion Pictures to produce commercial, English-language features for the global market.
Emotion Pictures will develop, acquire, fully finance and produce a slate of titles that Pathé will release in cinemas in France, Switzerland and Benelux.
Vendôme Group founder, chairman and co-CEO Philippe Rousselet and co-CEO Fabrice Gianfermi will oversee the Los Angeles and Paris-based outfit.
Emotion Pictures will operate separately from Pathe UK where Ben Browning, Pathe’s London-based president of global film and co-CEO of Pathe UK, will independently develop his own slate of productions.
Merit France, the family holding company of billionaire Rodolphe Saade, took a 20% stake in Pathe on the eve of Cannes 2025.
Pathé and Merit France will co-invest on a project-by-project basis to partially or fully bridge funding gaps to cover Emotion’s production slate.
The company brings together longtime collaborators Rousselet and Pathé boss Jerome Seydoux, who partnered on triple Oscar-winning Coda, and more recently Morten Tyldum’s Ibelin, now in production in Oslo.
The latter is based on the real-life story of Mats Steen and his titular alter ego of the War of Warcraft game and stars Charlie Plummer, Stephen Graham, Toni Collette, Isabela Merced, Maisy Stella and Bill Nighy.
Audience craving
Rousselet said he, Pathé’s Jerome Seydoux and Merit’s Rodolphe Saade “truly share a passion for stories and cinema” and added the new company “will be the home for filmmakers to tell original, commercial, and universally resonant stories. Films the studios used to make in the ’80s and ’90s, which audiences around the world are craving, and that have become far too rare today”.
Ardavan Safaee, president of Pathé, called Vendome and Rousselet “exceptional partners” and, citing Coda and Ibelin, said their collaboration “speaks to what becomes possible when shared values meet shared ambition.”
He added: “Pathé has always championed audience‑first storytelling without compromising on excellence, and Emotion Pictures is the natural expression of that conviction. Together with Vendôme and Merit France, we will back original, character‑driven films made for the big screen, stories that deliver ambition, craft, and emotion at a global scale.”
Pathe is in Cannes with a packed festival slate including Pedro Almodovar’s Bitter Christmas, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland and Arthur Harari’s The Unknown in competition, plus out of competition films Guillaume Canet’s Karma and the first instalment of the two-part Second World War epic De Gaulle: Titling Iron.
Vendome Pictures’ upcoming slate includes Andrew Niccol’s Lords Of War, starring Nicolas Cage and Bill Skarsgard, and Oren Moverman’s The Man With The Miraculous Hands, starring Woody Harrelson.
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