The long-awaited film version of cult Argentine TV series Los simuladores has been postponed due to production delays and the country’s “rather chaotic cultural policies,” actor Diego Peretti revealed on Monday. “We had promised to film in 2024 and premiere in 2025, but I don’t think we’ll be able to keep that promise,” Peretti said on Radio 10. In an interview, Peretti attributed the halt in production to the “complicated political situation” and “rather chaotic” cultural policies in Argentina, as well as “a certain crisis within streaming platforms [.
..] there’s a sort of stagnation that caused the production of the film to start to crumble.
” Premiered in 2002, Los simuladores was a hit TV show created by Damián Szifron that ran for two seasons. It featured Peretti, Federico D’Elía, Martín Seefeld and Alejandro Fiore as the Simuladores (Simulators), a group of men who orchestrate elaborate real-life situations to help out strangers in need by deceiving or influencing the people causing their problems. In the aftermath of Argentina’s 2001 social and economic crisis, the show about people in dire need finding solutions to their problems became a big hit.
The simulators’ clients were mostly regular people, including a loan shark’s victim and a supermarket owner neglected by his insurance company. The group’s overall goal was always to serve justice wherever legal routes proved ineffective. According to a source close to the movie project, it became cheaper to shoot the film abroad because of a lack of policies to incentivize movie productions in Argentina.
Such incentives are available in other South American countries, including Colombia and Uruguay. Industry sources told the Herald this comes amid a global crisis for big studios such as Paramount and Disney, which are still recovering from the hard-fought labor conflict of last year’s writers and actors’ strikes. Part of that recovery, they say, meant focusing on mainstream Hollywood projects with mass appeal, and prioritizing films and series that are likely to perform across platforms globally.
Earlier this year, Paramount’s former chief executive officer Bob Barkish stated that this would mean “fewer local, international originals for our platforms.” In mid-August, Paramount Global confirmed the closure of Paramount Television Studios as part of a broader financial restructuring that is reportedly part of the company’s efforts to cut costs by US$500 million ahead of a planned merger with Skydance. In addition to its popularity, Los Simuladores boosted the career of its director.
Szifron went on to direct the films The Bottom of the Sea and On Probation (also starring Peretti) and the TV show Hermanos & Detectives. He made the jump to Hollywood after getting an Oscar nomination in 2014 for his second film Wild Tales , which also won a BAFTA award, and will be re-released in Argentine theaters this weekend to celebrate its tenth anniversary. Szifron’s first film in English, Misanthrope , was released in 2023 with production by US company FilmNation and starred Shailene Woodley and Ben Mendelsohn.
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