In addition to attracting the public who watched the first version, works have the power to captivate younger people through the buzz generated with a new look.
Each week, a 9pm soap opera on Globo alone reaches 70 million people, which takes a video platform almost a year to achieve when adding up all its content. The broadcaster’s internal data demonstrates the strength of the format and how alive it is, even leading streaming services to produce soap operas as well.
What has drawn attention is that, in the last two years, Globo has been investing more in remakes of soap operas. First it was with Pantanal, in 2022, and this year he released a new version of Renascer. And why did the broadcaster decide to bring back these past successes in such a short space of time? Amauri Soares, director of Estdios Globo, TV Globo and Afiliadas, states that remakes are an opportunity.
Globo has been producing reinterpretations of classic works since the 1980s, when we aired new versions of Amor com amor se paga, Roque Santeiro and A gata comeu. In the last 40 years, we have made 26 remakes distributed across the three soap opera slots on Globo’s schedule. Our curatorship always seeks the best story for a given moment. It could be an original story or a remake, says Soares.
And anyone who thinks that soap operas don’t attract young Brazilians is wrong. According to Globo, the type of content most watched by young people in Brazil is soap operas: 85% of young Brazilians over the age of 12 watch soap operas. And, in prime time, TV Globo has more young people in its audience than all streaming services combined.
This shows two things: the vitality of the format and the attractiveness of the stories we have chosen to tell. The bond between the Brazilian audience and our soap operas is profound. Therefore, soap operas are our top priority. They reach more than 173 million people year after year, almost the entire Brazilian population, adds the director of Estdios Globo.
Nine o’clock soap operas have been the biggest audience on Brazilian TV for decades. And, according to Soares, they are also the most consumed content on Globoplay, both on TV Globo’s live signal and on demand. It’s a very powerful audience and, therefore, our choices need to be made with a very deep knowledge of Brazilians.
For Pedro Curi, coordinator of the cinema and audiovisual course at ESPM and specialist in fan culture, remakes have a very high possibility of success because they manage to rescue the public from the previous version and, through a new look, win over new audiences. In other words, there is a recovery of affective memory, creating a buzz around the soap opera and making a younger audience interested in watching it. We can see this both in Pantanal and in Renascer and other remakes made by Globo and cinema. Remaking cinema and television has long been a strategy to rescue stories that had great relevance and recognition from the public and the market and become current again. Pantanal returns at an important moment of discussion about the environment and Renascer has several issues that can be updated and at the time they were not so relevant, but today they can be rescued, says Curi.
In the same way that cinema never tires of adapting classic stories, there are soap operas by renowned authors and the remake is a way of valuing this work and national dramaturgy. Despite having a strong presence in Brazil, the soap opera is slowly losing its audience and needs to renew it. And the rescue of these soap operas brings a lost audience. There are many people in their 40s who watched these soap operas, who stopped watching them and started watching series, but who, through remakes (with renewed language), end up returning to the habit of watching soap operas, assesses the ESPM professor.
Curi believes that the soap opera model does not die, observing the growth in popularity of Turkish soap operas, for example, and Globoplay itself having foreign soap operas as originals.
Read the full article in the propmark of 18 brown of 2024
