20th Century Fox's thriller The Clearing, starring Robert Redford, Helen Mirren and Willem Dafoe, and the family comedy Catch That Girl have been added to the projects to be financed by Ideenkapital's Mediastream III fund, due to investor demand..

Ideenkapital had originally planned to raise Euros 246.7m from private German individuals to invest in the production of three other Fox projects: the Sean Connery vehicle The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the comedies Down With Love, starring Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, and Just Married with Brittany Murphy.

However, as the fund had proven so popular with private investors, Ideenkapital decided to exercise its option to increase the fund volume by Euros 45.6m to Euros 292.4m and so be able to back the Euros 12.7m The Clearing, to be directed by Pieter Jan Bruegge, and the Euros 25.7m Catch That Girl, scripted by Michael Brandt and Derrick Haas. A placement guarantee for the fund's complete volume has been furnished by the ERGO Trust GmbH or Ideenkapital, respectively.

As Ideenkapital board member Rolf Engelhardt observed, "the appeal of this offer is that we have numerous well-known Hollywood stars in one fund and that - completely independent of the planned postponement of the tax reform by a year - a relatively high return is being forecast." In a base case scenario the return on investment would amount to 11.9%.

The first two Mediastream funds saw Ideenkapital raise Euros 76.3m for the production of Paramount's The Fast And The Furious in the first fund and Euros 141.4m in the second for The Truth About Charlie and Big Fat Liar.

Meanwhile, another private German media fund Cinerenta internationale Filmproduktion GmbH, best known for financing such US independent productions as The Contender, Prozac Nation and Diamonds, will this week unveil a new cooperative initiative with the German federal states of Berlin and Brandenburg and Studio Babelsberg Motion Pictures, "which is to strengthen the production location of Berlin/Brandenburg and provide international recognition."

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