Uruguay Emerges as International Shoot Hub
In December 2024, as a film-TV force, Uruguay came of age, co-hosting with Cannes Film Market, Ventana Sur, Latin America's biggest film-TV market, held since 2009 in Buenos Aires.
Easy-to-work and welcoming, Ventana Sur also showcased what Uruguay can bring to the table.
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That, as of 2024, is rather a lot and cuts two ways: 'Both production services on foreign shoots and international co-productions,' says Marcio Migliorisi, head of international affairs at Uruguay's film-audiovisual agency ACAU.
Put together, they make Uruguay an ever-stronger film-TV hub and port-in-the-storm on a now highly volatile Latin American film-TV scene.
One game changer has been Uruguay's sky-rocketed international shoot scene.
Since 2019, Uruguay has hosted Keanu Reeves' 'The Conquest,' with troops storming Montevideo's central Plaza de la Independencia. The country also saw Bill Condon shoot the prison scenes of 'Kiss of the Spider Woman' and Brazil's 'Senna,' using Montevideo's airport to create a racetrack.
Most spectacularly as all Montevideo-based Cimarrón, now a pan-Latin American company owned by The Mediapro Studio, provided services on 'The Society of the Snow,' from J.A.Bayona, helping him to shoot the exact mountain backgrounds in the Valle de Lágrimas where the crash took place, and renovate Montevideo's old Carrasco Airport, now in disuse, for early scenes. The shoot serviced by Cimarrón called for 400 technicians and sometimes over 1,000 actors and extras.
Other shoots serviced in Uruguay include Daniel Burman's 'Yosi, the Regretful Spy,' Oscar winner Armando Bo's 'El Presidente,' Disney+'s 'El mejor infarto de mi vida,' HBO Max's 'Amsterdam,' Max's 'Margarita' and Dori Media thriller 'Amaia.'
'Uruguay's emergence as an international shoot hub is no matter of chance. With a population of 3.4 million fuelled by emigration from Europe, Uruguay cannot live on its internal market,' observes producer Andrés Varela. Its economy has always looked abroad.
'Uruguay is accustomed to collaboration, working together, given its scale and cultural and multicultural characteristics,' says Migliorisi.
In 2019, Uruguay's government launched a pilot Uruguay Audiovisual Program (PUA), offering up to 20%-25% cash rebates on foreign shoots and sizeable international co-productions, which are also waived 22% VAT payments.
Capped at $1 million per title, the rebates are not the only reason foreign companies, most especially global streamers, shoot in Uruguay.
COVID-19 hit Latin America in March 2020, five months after a pilot PUA was put it place. But the virus' incidence was low in Uruguay, with just 1,611 confirmed cases by September. With health and security protocols quickly put into place, Cimarrón's first production service, Prime Video's 'Manhãs de Setembro,' kicked off that same month. Other shoots – 'Yosi,' 'El Presidente' – followed quickly.
What streamers warmed to is a safe and stable country, in political and economic terms, with lower costs by international standards, stunning Montevideo architecture, from the colonial to neo-classical, Caribbean – convincing Michael Mann to shoot 2006's 'Miami Vice' in the country – and Art Nouveau and Art Deco. At a compact difference outside Montevideo are 1,000 kilometers of coast, a broad gamut of beaches, desert dunes and extensive rural landscapes.
Also key is the quality and depth of its local talent and technician pool.
'Over the last 15 years, a lot of universities in Uruguay have trained generations of highly flexible technicians, writers and directors,' says Cimarrón's Santiago López.
Shoot costs have not spiraled in consequence, adds Agustina Chiarino. Also, the industry has grown in specific technical expertise.
Uruguay's service scene is growing. Over 2019-23, 48 international productions shot in Uruguay. 20 filmed alone in 2024, according to ACAU stats. Now, the 'big challenge,' says Musaluppi, is how to leverage big shoots from overseas to develop Uruguayan talent.
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You've seen Alice in Wonderland. Now what about the Rabbit? What about the Cheshire Cat? Also, sometimes in your own franchise, you get so far up your own ass with the mythology that by the 10th movie you don't know what's going on. I don't ever want to get that way with Wick. I want each one to be able to stand alone. Was Keanu always supposed to appear in ? That wasn't in the original script. To be honest, I was kind of against it. But I do see the benefit and we wanted to help out [director Len Wiseman]. We had just opened John Wick 4 and it was huge. He couldn't go back to the model of the first John Wick and do a little $18 million indie thing and try to build it up. In order to stay in the same game, you got to give him a fighting chance. And the easiest way to transfer that over — at least, from the studio point of view — was have Wick in Ballerina in a special timeline. Does he appear in ? The Donny Yen spinoff doesn't have the John Wick character. It's got Donny Yen and it's an ode to kung fu movies. If John Wick 1 was about Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin, this is about Chow Yun-fat, John Woo and Wong Kar-wai. So I think that one is a little easier to get it across to audiences because it's in a sub-genre of what we love. The documentary shows the incredible amount of training Keanu undertakes, and his punishment seems to ramp up higher for each movie. He's now 60. If you do another with him, there has to be a limit to how hard you can push this guy, right? Because at a certain point, things break. What do you do if you're a world-class sprinter in your twenties and you don't run so fast at 30? You start doing marathons — because marathon runners hit their prime in their mid-to-late thirties. You got to deal with the turns. For the first John Wick, Keanu had a really bad knee injury and he couldn't punch and kick. So we came up with the Jiujitsu and gun-fu. We're not going to lower the bar. We're just going to move the bar to something we haven't done before. You've said that won't renege on the ending of , that John Wick will still have died. Has that evolved? The last time we spoke last year, you were trying to crack it. I'm not going to lie to you, it's a bit of a conundrum. Me and Mike Finch — the writer on 4 who's also writing 5 — we've got a pretty good story that I think is cool. Once we have a 50-page book, and if we're feeling it, we'll sit with Keanu and shape this thing. Look, everybody seems to want it. It's a matter of whether we crack it. We're actively working on it. It's just … is it going to be satisfying? Is a prequel possible? Because the anime movie is a prequel, I assume this wouldn't be. Keanu and I are not interested in going backwards. With the anime, you don't have to de-age, you don't have explain weird stuff, you don't have to add a backstory. You accept anime in its own language without explanations. Anime just goes pop. I know you've heard this before. But ended so well that there is a certain amount of … like there's this feeling that nothing popular is allowed to end anymore. I'm with you, man. Keanu and I have discussed this many times and feel the same way. We finished 3 and thought that was going to be the last one. Look, we never expected to end John Wick. I just hate cheesy endings. I hate happy endings. Over a long enough timeline, everything's a fucking tragedy. If you kill 86 people, you don't get away. So when we got to 4, we wanted to have something that had a lot of fate and consequence. The ending was going to be a cliffhanger. Then we were sitting in Japan [during the filming of 4] going, 'We didn't stick the landing.' [Our original ending] kind of sucked. 'Fuck, we got to finish this, right?' So I was really happy with the way 4 ended. It was Keanu and I saying, 'Thank you, it's been awesome, but it is time to go.' I didn't want to overstay our welcome. If we go down the road of John Wick 5 and build this story and decide this isn't right, there are probably going to be 10 other things we'll discover that we'll use for other things. It's a great creative exercise. It's being in the room riffing with people we love. That's nothing but wins. So it's not a lock that will exist? The studio would very much will it into existence, I'm sure, at some point. Look, they've been great and they've asked us to really try and we have a really good couple of ideas and we're going to try. What are the biggest mistakes action movies seem to be making when you see other films? Please make sure you print this: This is only my opinion and my opinion is no better or worse than anybody else's. Some things I think don't work might work for some people. It's the execution. Like with Die Hard. There's not a lot of action, the whole thing takes place on three floors of a building, but John McClane is a great character. 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Norman Reedus Hopes to Return for a BALLERINA Sequel: 'He's Willing to Fight Everybody in the World' — GeekTyrant
Norman Reedus is trading zombies for assassins in Ballerina , the upcoming spinoff in the John Wick universe, and if he has his way, we haven't seen the last of him. In the film, Reedus plays Daniel, a quiet but deadly figure with his own motives. While Ana de Armas' Eve is out for revenge, Daniel's mission is more personal as he's looking at keeping his daughter safe from the violent world he knows all too well, and he's prepared to burn it all down to do it. Reedus says: 'He would have grown up with a lot of guilt, a lot of murder, a lot of secrecy, and I think he's just come to a point where his little girl, who's about to be introduced to this world, he's willing to fight everybody in the world.' Reedus sees a shared drive between his character and both Eve and John Wick himself, people pushed to the edge for something they love, with no limits to how far they'll go. 'He doesn't want this for his daughter, so he's going to do everything he can to make sure that he can get her out of there. 'It sort of mirrors Ana's character, in a way, because she's fighting everyone, which is the same as Keanu in the John Wicks. 'It's that important to her to get the revenge, and it's that important to Daniel to save his little girl. So I think that's where those two characters come together.' And while Ballerina gives us a glimpse into Daniel's past, a lot of it is still under wraps, something Reedus is itching to explore in a sequel. 'I would love to see that happen. I'd love to see how he got where he got, and what brought him to that boiling point. I mean, being in a John Wick movie is kind of a bucket list for an actor. It's just too cool. So hopefully, yeah, I would love that.' With Ballerina expanding the John Wick universe in new directions, Reedus' Daniel seems like a character with plenty of unfinished business, and maybe even a spinoff of his own somewhere down the road.
