War of the Kingdoms is, by any measure, a big swing.
The epic German fantasy series, which Fremantle presented to buyers at last month’s London Screenings and unspools at Series Mania‘s inaugural buyers upfront event on Monday, is one of the most expensive and ambitious projects to come out of Europe.
Adapted from Wolfgang Hohlbein’s 1986 novel Hagen von Tronje by Cyrill Boss and Philipp Stennert, the duo behind Sky Germany’s hit mystery series Pagan Peak, it is a retelling of the German Nibelung saga, a tale of dragons, dwarves and magic credited as a major inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and, by extension, Game of Thrones.
For a European, non-English-language project, it is also huge. The budget, according to producers, was north of $50 million.
To make the numbers work, Constantin created a new model for the production, shooting a feature film version of the story, titled Hagen, and the six-part TV series simultaneously. The film version, Hagen, hit German theaters last year. The series will premiere on German streamer RTL+ later in 2025.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter back in 2022, Constantin’s Martin Moszkowicz, an executive producer on the project, said the bespoke financial model made “economic sense, but also creative sense,” by allowing the directors to tell two separate versions of the same story. Unlike Constantin’s previous film-TV hybrids — the German group produced two-part miniseries versions of Oscar-nominated features Downfall and The Baader Meinhof Complex alongside the movie edits — Hagen/War of the Kingdoms was conceived as two separate stories. “The narrative perspective in the series [is] very different from that of the cinema version,” Moszkowicz said. “They are being produced together but they are independent products.”
Unlike previous adaptations of the Nibelungenlied — from Fritz Lang’s 1924 two-part film classic to a 2004 TV movie version starring Kristanna Loken and a young Robert Pattinson — Hagen and War of the Kingdoms take a fresh approach by turning Hagen, the saga’s traditional villain, into the protagonist, and Siegfried, the blond, dragon-slaying hero in most versions of the story, into a dangerously charismatic populist who threatens the stability of the kingdom. Dutch actor Gijs Naber (Blackbook, The Story of My Wife) plays Hagen, Jannis Niewöhner (Berlin Station) is Siegfried. Lilja van der Zwaag, Rosalinde Mynster and Dominic Marcus Singer co-star.
Constantin’s innovative film-TV hybrid is being tested in real time. Hagen, the feature film, floundered in theaters, pulling in fewer than 178,000 viewers in Germany, representing around a box office take of around $2 million, a disappointing showing for a film designed to be epic.
War of the Kingdoms bow at Series Mania represents an opportunity to grasp streaming victory from the jaws of theatrical defeat.
Fremantle had considerable success with the Constantin/Amazon Studios’ We Children From Bahnhof Zoo (2021), a retelling of the drug addiction biography Christine F., famous for Uli Edel 1981 film adaptation. But War of the Kingdoms, conceived during the global streaming boom, hits the market as buyers are pulling back from ambitious (and expensive) series in favor of more dependable, lower-cost procedurals and action thrillers.
Ahead of Series Mania, Fremantle said it had no deals to unveil for the show. Constantin’s high-stakes bet could be a make-or-break test of the global appeal of premium European fantasy.
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