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Front Page, Headline, Industry News
Why TV production is exploding across Canada (and it’s not just because of the low loonie)
Thursday March 10th 2016Dimitrios “Jim” Mirkopoulos drinks too much coffee. Perhaps this is excusable. His wife, Stacey, recently gave birth to their sixth child. And father is just one of his roles. He also plays leading man for Cinespace Studios Inc., the Mirkopoulos family business.
Movies shot in Cinespace studios include Cinderella Man, Hairspray, Pompeii, Saw II, III, IV, V, VI and VII and X-Men. TV shows include Anne of Green Gables, Flashpoint and FX: The Series.
At one Cinespace facility, in an old Consumers Glass factory on Toronto’s Kipling Avenue that made glass bottles for Crown Royal whisky, Mirkopoulos, 43, is gussied up in a jacket, v-neck sweater and tie (and a bracelet painted with Greek Orthodox icons) ready to offer a tour. Fueled by java, he speaks in an endless stream of consciousness.
“We’re 90-per-cent complete in the work on this studio,” he says. He shows off a castle, the set of Reign — a TV show for CBS about Mary, Queen of Scots. “It’s a little bit slutty,” he confides. “You gotta see the actors. They are all good-looking 20-somethings.”
He changes topics. “The producers of the lacrosse movie (Grizzlies) want me to go to Iqaluit with them next week, but I said, ‘Sorry guys, I’m going to be in L.A. with the mayor.’”
Mirkopoulos is busy and so are his studios. The one-million-square-foot Kipling studio is full. Here and across Canada, the business of making moving pictures has rarely been better. Low oil prices have hurt Alberta and Saskatchewan, but the resultant plunge in the loonie has U.S. producers streaming into Canada.
Foreign motion picture companies poured $300 million into Quebec last year, up 60 per cent from 2014. British Columbia has recently hosted Star Trek 3, Deadpool starring Vancouver’s Ryan Reynolds, and Fifty Shades of Grey; TV and film pumped $2 billion into B.C. last year.
Toronto, which this week celebrated the Best Picture Oscar awarded to Spotlight — filmed in one of the city’s warehouses — has run out of space.
“In Toronto, there is no stage space available at all,” says producer Don Carmody, who splits his time between Toronto and Los Angeles. He has rented a warehouse in Mississauga, just west of Toronto, to make Shadow Hunters for ABC and Netflix. It’s not great: “Three busted pipes flooded the whole goddamn stage.”
But Carmody just can’t find any place else to shoot at the moment. Toronto and other Canadian cities are swamped with work, and not just because our dollar is cheap, which has driven past boom times. The bigger trend, to use Mirkopoulos’s word, is the “Netflixization” of the industry.
The Sopranos pioneered big, lavish TV shows. Game of Thrones came next, then House of Cards. Toronto, with its talented crews of everyone from set dressers to carpenters to camera operators and sound mixers, is getting a lot of this work: In 2012, 18 foreign television series filmed in Ontario; that number rose to 26 TV series in 2014.
“Fifteen years ago, a TV show would have 15,000 square feet,” Mirkopoulos says. “Guillermo del Toro has rented 50,000 square feet for one show. It’s a huge footprint.”
One benefit of the change is that TV shows shoot for 10 months at a time. “These are high-paying, good-quality jobs, which was unheard of previously in this industry,” he says. (Grips and carpenters, however, note they earn $10 less per hour on TV sets than movie sets).
As TV shows flood in, the Mirkopoulos family is well positioned to benefit. Cinespace is a family business, as parking spaces here testify. Signs mark the spots for Mike (Jim’s brother), Steve (Jim’s uncle), Larry (Jim’s father), Chrisoula (Jim’s cousin) and Jim himself. All but Steve’s are full — he and his wife are in Australia.
Cinespace now owns three studios in Toronto and one in Chicago. At a cappuccino stand at Cinespace Kipling, producers Frank Siracusa and John Weber stop to chat.
“We’ve known Jim for many years,” says Siracusa, who with Weber has five television shows underway here: Reign, Transylvania, Incorporated, Beauty and the Beast and American Gothic. “It’s not a corporate relationship. It’s a family business.”
Producers value the Mirkopoulos family for their ingenuity. “When we started here, it was an empty warehouse. These guys pulled it off. They raised the roof, put in six layers of drywall to soundproof it.”
Siracusa estimates that he and Weber have spent $1 billion in Ontario during the past four years, which is a fair chunk of change considering motion pictures spent about $1.3 billion into Ontario in 2014. Like other producers, they have run out of space.
“Dundas, Ontario, is a popular filming spot,” Siracusa says. “But they grow tired of us. Now we are costing out what it would take to build the street in Dundas on our set.” He smiles: “Jim will find us a spot.”
From the Kipling studio, Jim Mirkopoulos steers east in his silver Honda Pilot SUV. At a traffic light a homeless man approaches. Mirkopoulos lowers the window and hands him a snack.
“Now I have to lie to my wife and tell her that I ate the fermented vegan protein bar,” he says. He parks at an Italian restaurant for lunch and enthusiastically greets the owner by name: “Hi Bambi!”
Later Mirkopoulos enters another Cinespace studio, once an industrial laundry, now called 30 Booth. His secretary approaches. “Anything urgent?” he asks. “Because I’ve got like 100 emails.” She shrugs and walks away.
He climbs stairs two at a time to the office of Miles Dale, producer of the vampire apocalypse show The Strain. The severed heads of two nuns stare from Dale’s windowsill. One sucks a cigar. “They both had cigars, but one day I needed a cigar so I smoked it,” Dale explains.
Dale recalls he met the Mirkopoulos family in 1993 when he shot the Robocop series in a space converted by Jim’s uncle Nick Mirkopoulos, the Greek-born, German-trained electrician who founded Cinespace.
“He was a construction savant,” Dale says. “These are people in our business that you have lifelong relationships and friendships with. They are a cornerstone. They have all these studios, they have taken on massive debt.”
Still, Vancouver, with superior facilities, remains well ahead of Toronto.
“Vancouver has 60 purpose-built studios,” says Paul Bronfman, owner of William F. White, the biggest supplier of lighting to Canada’s film business, with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto and Halifax. “Toronto has 10. The B.C. government has been good with low- and no-interest loans, and they have offshore dollars who will take a low return on investment just to get their money into Canada. They have always been way ahead of us.”
Bronfman chairs the board of Pinewood Toronto, the largest purpose-built studio on the Toronto waterfront, where crews shot this year’s Oscar-nominee The Room. Pinewood, whose investors include the City of Toronto, announced this week that by 2018 it will open new workshop and production spaces, retail space and a parking garage.
Cinespace, though, has always preferred to rebuild factories as studios. “The Mirkopoulos family are the best at doing retrofits,” Bronfman says. “They are a unique family. They are really at the top of their field.”
On The Strain’s set, scenic artists have recreated an apartment in Amsterdam in the 1970s. The living room looks tame and ornate; push on a bookcase and you enter a tiled medical torture chamber, with bottles of coloured liquids labeled in German and stainless steel dissection tables. Body-sized cages hang from the walls. Behind a plastic curtain in a cooler lurks a gory surprise.
Tamara Deverell, production designer of The Strain, prefers in many ways working at Cinespace to Pinewood Studios; Cinespace’s office space is better designed for her industry.
“The Mirkopoulos family made it happen in Toronto as much as anyone,” she says. “As the film industry grew, they grew with it. They said, ‘Oh, we need height. Blow the roof off.’ They are in tune.”
Today, studios in Toronto exude confidence. The future appears secure: The last time the loonie and U.S. dollar reached parity, in 2011, foreign film and TV production in Ontario rose, anyway, though it’s been flat since then.
The Mirkopoulos family also continues to invest. They spent US$100 million in Chicago in the past five years to convert a steel plant into the 50-acre Cinespace Chicago, now home to four TV shows: Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, Chicago P.D. and Chicago Legal. Alex, Dean and Nick Pissios, cousins of the Mirkopouloses, run the Chicago division.
Asked whether they will invest in Vancouver, Mirkopoulos answers quickly. “No. We have no family there.”
In Toronto the Mirkopoulos clan, a feisty bunch, has often fought with politicians. Jim’s uncles battled David Miller, a former mayor, when he supported their competitor, Pinewood; Jim Mirkopoulos backed Rob Ford for mayor. We know how that worked out.
After Toronto elected John Tory, the Mirkopoulos family withdrew lawsuits against the city; last week Mirkopoulos joined Tory in Los Angeles to boost Toronto as a filming centre.
“Our family gets the distinct impression that (Tory) is a highly intelligent and diplomatic problem solver,” Mirkopoulos says. This is flowery language from a family more skilled at gutting factories and speaking off the cuff. Still, Mirkopoulos calculates that conciliation will help him achieve his current dream: to secure city land in the port to erect a new purpose-built Toronto studio and backlot campus.
Source: Financial Post
Front Page, Headline, Industry News
Why TV production is exploding across Canada (and it’s not just because of the low loonie)
Thursday March 10th 2016Dimitrios “Jim” Mirkopoulos drinks too much coffee. Perhaps this is excusable. His wife, Stacey, recently gave birth to their sixth child. And father is just one of his roles. He also plays leading man for Cinespace Studios Inc., the Mirkopoulos family business.
Movies shot in Cinespace studios include Cinderella Man, Hairspray, Pompeii, Saw II, III, IV, V, VI and VII and X-Men. TV shows include Anne of Green Gables, Flashpoint and FX: The Series.
At one Cinespace facility, in an old Consumers Glass factory on Toronto’s Kipling Avenue that made glass bottles for Crown Royal whisky, Mirkopoulos, 43, is gussied up in a jacket, v-neck sweater and tie (and a bracelet painted with Greek Orthodox icons) ready to offer a tour. Fueled by java, he speaks in an endless stream of consciousness.
“We’re 90-per-cent complete in the work on this studio,” he says. He shows off a castle, the set of Reign — a TV show for CBS about Mary, Queen of Scots. “It’s a little bit slutty,” he confides. “You gotta see the actors. They are all good-looking 20-somethings.”
He changes topics. “The producers of the lacrosse movie (Grizzlies) want me to go to Iqaluit with them next week, but I said, ‘Sorry guys, I’m going to be in L.A. with the mayor.’”
Mirkopoulos is busy and so are his studios. The one-million-square-foot Kipling studio is full. Here and across Canada, the business of making moving pictures has rarely been better. Low oil prices have hurt Alberta and Saskatchewan, but the resultant plunge in the loonie has U.S. producers streaming into Canada.
Foreign motion picture companies poured $300 million into Quebec last year, up 60 per cent from 2014. British Columbia has recently hosted Star Trek 3, Deadpool starring Vancouver’s Ryan Reynolds, and Fifty Shades of Grey; TV and film pumped $2 billion into B.C. last year.
Toronto, which this week celebrated the Best Picture Oscar awarded to Spotlight — filmed in one of the city’s warehouses — has run out of space.
“In Toronto, there is no stage space available at all,” says producer Don Carmody, who splits his time between Toronto and Los Angeles. He has rented a warehouse in Mississauga, just west of Toronto, to make Shadow Hunters for ABC and Netflix. It’s not great: “Three busted pipes flooded the whole goddamn stage.”
But Carmody just can’t find any place else to shoot at the moment. Toronto and other Canadian cities are swamped with work, and not just because our dollar is cheap, which has driven past boom times. The bigger trend, to use Mirkopoulos’s word, is the “Netflixization” of the industry.
The Sopranos pioneered big, lavish TV shows. Game of Thrones came next, then House of Cards. Toronto, with its talented crews of everyone from set dressers to carpenters to camera operators and sound mixers, is getting a lot of this work: In 2012, 18 foreign television series filmed in Ontario; that number rose to 26 TV series in 2014.
“Fifteen years ago, a TV show would have 15,000 square feet,” Mirkopoulos says. “Guillermo del Toro has rented 50,000 square feet for one show. It’s a huge footprint.”
One benefit of the change is that TV shows shoot for 10 months at a time. “These are high-paying, good-quality jobs, which was unheard of previously in this industry,” he says. (Grips and carpenters, however, note they earn $10 less per hour on TV sets than movie sets).
As TV shows flood in, the Mirkopoulos family is well positioned to benefit. Cinespace is a family business, as parking spaces here testify. Signs mark the spots for Mike (Jim’s brother), Steve (Jim’s uncle), Larry (Jim’s father), Chrisoula (Jim’s cousin) and Jim himself. All but Steve’s are full — he and his wife are in Australia.
Cinespace now owns three studios in Toronto and one in Chicago. At a cappuccino stand at Cinespace Kipling, producers Frank Siracusa and John Weber stop to chat.
“We’ve known Jim for many years,” says Siracusa, who with Weber has five television shows underway here: Reign, Transylvania, Incorporated, Beauty and the Beast and American Gothic. “It’s not a corporate relationship. It’s a family business.”
Producers value the Mirkopoulos family for their ingenuity. “When we started here, it was an empty warehouse. These guys pulled it off. They raised the roof, put in six layers of drywall to soundproof it.”
Siracusa estimates that he and Weber have spent $1 billion in Ontario during the past four years, which is a fair chunk of change considering motion pictures spent about $1.3 billion into Ontario in 2014. Like other producers, they have run out of space.
“Dundas, Ontario, is a popular filming spot,” Siracusa says. “But they grow tired of us. Now we are costing out what it would take to build the street in Dundas on our set.” He smiles: “Jim will find us a spot.”
From the Kipling studio, Jim Mirkopoulos steers east in his silver Honda Pilot SUV. At a traffic light a homeless man approaches. Mirkopoulos lowers the window and hands him a snack.
“Now I have to lie to my wife and tell her that I ate the fermented vegan protein bar,” he says. He parks at an Italian restaurant for lunch and enthusiastically greets the owner by name: “Hi Bambi!”
Later Mirkopoulos enters another Cinespace studio, once an industrial laundry, now called 30 Booth. His secretary approaches. “Anything urgent?” he asks. “Because I’ve got like 100 emails.” She shrugs and walks away.
He climbs stairs two at a time to the office of Miles Dale, producer of the vampire apocalypse show The Strain. The severed heads of two nuns stare from Dale’s windowsill. One sucks a cigar. “They both had cigars, but one day I needed a cigar so I smoked it,” Dale explains.
Dale recalls he met the Mirkopoulos family in 1993 when he shot the Robocop series in a space converted by Jim’s uncle Nick Mirkopoulos, the Greek-born, German-trained electrician who founded Cinespace.
“He was a construction savant,” Dale says. “These are people in our business that you have lifelong relationships and friendships with. They are a cornerstone. They have all these studios, they have taken on massive debt.”
Still, Vancouver, with superior facilities, remains well ahead of Toronto.
“Vancouver has 60 purpose-built studios,” says Paul Bronfman, owner of William F. White, the biggest supplier of lighting to Canada’s film business, with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto and Halifax. “Toronto has 10. The B.C. government has been good with low- and no-interest loans, and they have offshore dollars who will take a low return on investment just to get their money into Canada. They have always been way ahead of us.”
Bronfman chairs the board of Pinewood Toronto, the largest purpose-built studio on the Toronto waterfront, where crews shot this year’s Oscar-nominee The Room. Pinewood, whose investors include the City of Toronto, announced this week that by 2018 it will open new workshop and production spaces, retail space and a parking garage.
Cinespace, though, has always preferred to rebuild factories as studios. “The Mirkopoulos family are the best at doing retrofits,” Bronfman says. “They are a unique family. They are really at the top of their field.”
On The Strain’s set, scenic artists have recreated an apartment in Amsterdam in the 1970s. The living room looks tame and ornate; push on a bookcase and you enter a tiled medical torture chamber, with bottles of coloured liquids labeled in German and stainless steel dissection tables. Body-sized cages hang from the walls. Behind a plastic curtain in a cooler lurks a gory surprise.
Tamara Deverell, production designer of The Strain, prefers in many ways working at Cinespace to Pinewood Studios; Cinespace’s office space is better designed for her industry.
“The Mirkopoulos family made it happen in Toronto as much as anyone,” she says. “As the film industry grew, they grew with it. They said, ‘Oh, we need height. Blow the roof off.’ They are in tune.”
Today, studios in Toronto exude confidence. The future appears secure: The last time the loonie and U.S. dollar reached parity, in 2011, foreign film and TV production in Ontario rose, anyway, though it’s been flat since then.
The Mirkopoulos family also continues to invest. They spent US$100 million in Chicago in the past five years to convert a steel plant into the 50-acre Cinespace Chicago, now home to four TV shows: Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, Chicago P.D. and Chicago Legal. Alex, Dean and Nick Pissios, cousins of the Mirkopouloses, run the Chicago division.
Asked whether they will invest in Vancouver, Mirkopoulos answers quickly. “No. We have no family there.”
In Toronto the Mirkopoulos clan, a feisty bunch, has often fought with politicians. Jim’s uncles battled David Miller, a former mayor, when he supported their competitor, Pinewood; Jim Mirkopoulos backed Rob Ford for mayor. We know how that worked out.
After Toronto elected John Tory, the Mirkopoulos family withdrew lawsuits against the city; last week Mirkopoulos joined Tory in Los Angeles to boost Toronto as a filming centre.
“Our family gets the distinct impression that (Tory) is a highly intelligent and diplomatic problem solver,” Mirkopoulos says. This is flowery language from a family more skilled at gutting factories and speaking off the cuff. Still, Mirkopoulos calculates that conciliation will help him achieve his current dream: to secure city land in the port to erect a new purpose-built Toronto studio and backlot campus.
Source: Financial Post
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Front Page, Headline, Industry News
Why TV production is exploding across Canada (and it’s not just because of the low loonie)
Thursday March 10th 2016Dimitrios “Jim” Mirkopoulos drinks too much coffee. Perhaps this is excusable. His wife, Stacey, recently gave birth to their sixth child. And father is just one of his roles. He also plays leading man for Cinespace Studios Inc., the Mirkopoulos family business.
Movies shot in Cinespace studios include Cinderella Man, Hairspray, Pompeii, Saw II, III, IV, V, VI and VII and X-Men. TV shows include Anne of Green Gables, Flashpoint and FX: The Series.
At one Cinespace facility, in an old Consumers Glass factory on Toronto’s Kipling Avenue that made glass bottles for Crown Royal whisky, Mirkopoulos, 43, is gussied up in a jacket, v-neck sweater and tie (and a bracelet painted with Greek Orthodox icons) ready to offer a tour. Fueled by java, he speaks in an endless stream of consciousness.
“We’re 90-per-cent complete in the work on this studio,” he says. He shows off a castle, the set of Reign — a TV show for CBS about Mary, Queen of Scots. “It’s a little bit slutty,” he confides. “You gotta see the actors. They are all good-looking 20-somethings.”
He changes topics. “The producers of the lacrosse movie (Grizzlies) want me to go to Iqaluit with them next week, but I said, ‘Sorry guys, I’m going to be in L.A. with the mayor.’”
Mirkopoulos is busy and so are his studios. The one-million-square-foot Kipling studio is full. Here and across Canada, the business of making moving pictures has rarely been better. Low oil prices have hurt Alberta and Saskatchewan, but the resultant plunge in the loonie has U.S. producers streaming into Canada.
Foreign motion picture companies poured $300 million into Quebec last year, up 60 per cent from 2014. British Columbia has recently hosted Star Trek 3, Deadpool starring Vancouver’s Ryan Reynolds, and Fifty Shades of Grey; TV and film pumped $2 billion into B.C. last year.
Toronto, which this week celebrated the Best Picture Oscar awarded to Spotlight — filmed in one of the city’s warehouses — has run out of space.
“In Toronto, there is no stage space available at all,” says producer Don Carmody, who splits his time between Toronto and Los Angeles. He has rented a warehouse in Mississauga, just west of Toronto, to make Shadow Hunters for ABC and Netflix. It’s not great: “Three busted pipes flooded the whole goddamn stage.”
But Carmody just can’t find any place else to shoot at the moment. Toronto and other Canadian cities are swamped with work, and not just because our dollar is cheap, which has driven past boom times. The bigger trend, to use Mirkopoulos’s word, is the “Netflixization” of the industry.
The Sopranos pioneered big, lavish TV shows. Game of Thrones came next, then House of Cards. Toronto, with its talented crews of everyone from set dressers to carpenters to camera operators and sound mixers, is getting a lot of this work: In 2012, 18 foreign television series filmed in Ontario; that number rose to 26 TV series in 2014.
“Fifteen years ago, a TV show would have 15,000 square feet,” Mirkopoulos says. “Guillermo del Toro has rented 50,000 square feet for one show. It’s a huge footprint.”
One benefit of the change is that TV shows shoot for 10 months at a time. “These are high-paying, good-quality jobs, which was unheard of previously in this industry,” he says. (Grips and carpenters, however, note they earn $10 less per hour on TV sets than movie sets).
As TV shows flood in, the Mirkopoulos family is well positioned to benefit. Cinespace is a family business, as parking spaces here testify. Signs mark the spots for Mike (Jim’s brother), Steve (Jim’s uncle), Larry (Jim’s father), Chrisoula (Jim’s cousin) and Jim himself. All but Steve’s are full — he and his wife are in Australia.
Cinespace now owns three studios in Toronto and one in Chicago. At a cappuccino stand at Cinespace Kipling, producers Frank Siracusa and John Weber stop to chat.
“We’ve known Jim for many years,” says Siracusa, who with Weber has five television shows underway here: Reign, Transylvania, Incorporated, Beauty and the Beast and American Gothic. “It’s not a corporate relationship. It’s a family business.”
Producers value the Mirkopoulos family for their ingenuity. “When we started here, it was an empty warehouse. These guys pulled it off. They raised the roof, put in six layers of drywall to soundproof it.”
Siracusa estimates that he and Weber have spent $1 billion in Ontario during the past four years, which is a fair chunk of change considering motion pictures spent about $1.3 billion into Ontario in 2014. Like other producers, they have run out of space.
“Dundas, Ontario, is a popular filming spot,” Siracusa says. “But they grow tired of us. Now we are costing out what it would take to build the street in Dundas on our set.” He smiles: “Jim will find us a spot.”
From the Kipling studio, Jim Mirkopoulos steers east in his silver Honda Pilot SUV. At a traffic light a homeless man approaches. Mirkopoulos lowers the window and hands him a snack.
“Now I have to lie to my wife and tell her that I ate the fermented vegan protein bar,” he says. He parks at an Italian restaurant for lunch and enthusiastically greets the owner by name: “Hi Bambi!”
Later Mirkopoulos enters another Cinespace studio, once an industrial laundry, now called 30 Booth. His secretary approaches. “Anything urgent?” he asks. “Because I’ve got like 100 emails.” She shrugs and walks away.
He climbs stairs two at a time to the office of Miles Dale, producer of the vampire apocalypse show The Strain. The severed heads of two nuns stare from Dale’s windowsill. One sucks a cigar. “They both had cigars, but one day I needed a cigar so I smoked it,” Dale explains.
Dale recalls he met the Mirkopoulos family in 1993 when he shot the Robocop series in a space converted by Jim’s uncle Nick Mirkopoulos, the Greek-born, German-trained electrician who founded Cinespace.
“He was a construction savant,” Dale says. “These are people in our business that you have lifelong relationships and friendships with. They are a cornerstone. They have all these studios, they have taken on massive debt.”
Still, Vancouver, with superior facilities, remains well ahead of Toronto.
“Vancouver has 60 purpose-built studios,” says Paul Bronfman, owner of William F. White, the biggest supplier of lighting to Canada’s film business, with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto and Halifax. “Toronto has 10. The B.C. government has been good with low- and no-interest loans, and they have offshore dollars who will take a low return on investment just to get their money into Canada. They have always been way ahead of us.”
Bronfman chairs the board of Pinewood Toronto, the largest purpose-built studio on the Toronto waterfront, where crews shot this year’s Oscar-nominee The Room. Pinewood, whose investors include the City of Toronto, announced this week that by 2018 it will open new workshop and production spaces, retail space and a parking garage.
Cinespace, though, has always preferred to rebuild factories as studios. “The Mirkopoulos family are the best at doing retrofits,” Bronfman says. “They are a unique family. They are really at the top of their field.”
On The Strain’s set, scenic artists have recreated an apartment in Amsterdam in the 1970s. The living room looks tame and ornate; push on a bookcase and you enter a tiled medical torture chamber, with bottles of coloured liquids labeled in German and stainless steel dissection tables. Body-sized cages hang from the walls. Behind a plastic curtain in a cooler lurks a gory surprise.
Tamara Deverell, production designer of The Strain, prefers in many ways working at Cinespace to Pinewood Studios; Cinespace’s office space is better designed for her industry.
“The Mirkopoulos family made it happen in Toronto as much as anyone,” she says. “As the film industry grew, they grew with it. They said, ‘Oh, we need height. Blow the roof off.’ They are in tune.”
Today, studios in Toronto exude confidence. The future appears secure: The last time the loonie and U.S. dollar reached parity, in 2011, foreign film and TV production in Ontario rose, anyway, though it’s been flat since then.
The Mirkopoulos family also continues to invest. They spent US$100 million in Chicago in the past five years to convert a steel plant into the 50-acre Cinespace Chicago, now home to four TV shows: Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, Chicago P.D. and Chicago Legal. Alex, Dean and Nick Pissios, cousins of the Mirkopouloses, run the Chicago division.
Asked whether they will invest in Vancouver, Mirkopoulos answers quickly. “No. We have no family there.”
In Toronto the Mirkopoulos clan, a feisty bunch, has often fought with politicians. Jim’s uncles battled David Miller, a former mayor, when he supported their competitor, Pinewood; Jim Mirkopoulos backed Rob Ford for mayor. We know how that worked out.
After Toronto elected John Tory, the Mirkopoulos family withdrew lawsuits against the city; last week Mirkopoulos joined Tory in Los Angeles to boost Toronto as a filming centre.
“Our family gets the distinct impression that (Tory) is a highly intelligent and diplomatic problem solver,” Mirkopoulos says. This is flowery language from a family more skilled at gutting factories and speaking off the cuff. Still, Mirkopoulos calculates that conciliation will help him achieve his current dream: to secure city land in the port to erect a new purpose-built Toronto studio and backlot campus.
Source: Financial Post
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