Ex-Mediawan producer Charlotte Toledano Detaille launches Alyx Films with creator Geronimo

Charlotte Toledano Detaille has decided the smartest move in French television right now is to stop working for someone else and start betting on people who built their fame on YouTube instead. The former Mediawan producer behind Prime Video’s streaming hit Escort Boys is launching Alyx Films, an independent banner based in Paris and the south of France, and her opening gambit is a partnership with French digital creator Geronimo, whose viral series The Book Club has racked up more than 35 million views and reached an audience of 450 million people across platforms.

The exclusive tie-up runs deep. Alyx Films and Geronimo are co-producing his first short film and his first feature, while also developing a hybrid talk show for a subscription streaming platform. It is a deliberate statement of intent for the new company, which Toledano Detaille wants built around premium fiction, international formats and projects that deliberately blur traditional and digital culture rather than treat them as separate worlds.

She brings more than two decades inside France’s biggest media houses to the venture, having held senior roles at Endemol, Banijay, Newen, Studio TF1 and Lagardère Studios, where she worked as associate producer on Grégory, Netflix France’s first original documentary series. In 2021 she co-founded Story Nation within Mediawan, producing both fiction and documentary work, and alongside Escort Boys she also brought the American format Hot Ones to France, where it has now run for four seasons across Canal+ and YouTube.

After years inside the machinery of France’s largest media companies, going independent felt like the obvious next step, not least because it lets her retain ownership and control of the intellectual property behind the shows she produces. The industry, she told Variety, is shifting fast, and independent structures are better placed to adapt to new formats, new talent and new ways of producing.

Her enthusiasm for digital creators is unambiguous. She says she is drawn to their freedom and boldness and their tight bond with their audiences, an instinct for real-time audience feedback that traditional film and television systems simply do not have. Creators test, fail, adjust and succeed far faster than the conventional industry does, in her telling, and the sharpest ones often handle every part of the job themselves, producing, writing, acting, directing and editing their own work.

Geronimo, she argues, stood out because he was already operating like a filmmaker rather than a content creator, and his work had the kind of high-concept, internationally exportable appeal she spent years hunting for on the development and format side of the business.

Toledano Detaille’s broader thesis is that the next wave of premium storytelling will come from pairing online-native creators with seasoned film and television writers, producers and executives. She points to the low-budget horror hit Obsession, written and directed by YouTube creators, and to the French phenomenon Kaizen, from YouTuber Inoxtag, which enjoyed a strong cinema run, as evidence that online creators are ready for proper long-form storytelling, and that investors and commissioners ought to be paying closer attention than ever.

Alyx Films is not stopping at one creator partnership. The company is also developing adaptations of international scripted and unscripted formats, including negotiations to bring another Israeli series to the French market, building directly on the experience that produced Escort Boys, the Ruben Alves-directed Prime Video comedy that ran for two seasons and became one of the most talked-about French streaming exports of recent years.

A producer with two decades inside the establishment has just placed her chips on the outsiders, and if Geronimo’s numbers are anything to go by, French television’s next big hit might not come from a writers’ room at all. It might come from a teenager’s bedroom with a ring light and a following nobody in the industry saw coming.