A vampire comedy lands in Cannes orbit: how a French-Anglo co-production is being built around Chinenye Ezeudu-Sterling

Two Paris-based production companies have boarded Gro(ceries), a vampire self-identity comedy that will star and be co-written by Chinenye Ezeudu-Sterling of Sex Education fame. SCoT(T) and The Project joined the project ahead of this week's Marché du Film at the Cannes Festival, where the title is being shopped to finishing funds and sales agents through the Frontières co-production market. The trade confirmation landed at 16:26 UTC on 14 July 2026.

For a genre film still in financing, the announcement is unusually tidy: a recognisable lead, a writer-producer who can carry development, and two experienced French companies now attached at a moment when European genre film money is actively hunting for English-language anchors.

What the deal actually is

Frontières is the genre-focused co-production platform run alongside Cannes' Marché du Film, designed to pair projects with the cross-border partners they need to close a budget. Gro(ceries), by that description, arrived at the market incomplete on the production side and left with two of the missing pieces. SCoT(T) and The Project are now co-production partners; Variety's exclusive does not specify the size of their equity slices or the budget envelope. What is clear is that the lead is locked, the writer is also the star, and the financing geography is continental.

Frontières' pitch was that the vampire set-up was being used as a vehicle for a story about selfhood: a clean genre premise wrapped around an identity question, written by and for a performer whose profile grew sharply through British television. Ezeudu-Sterling's role in Sex Education, the Netflix series that ran from 2019 to 2023 and functioned, for a stretch, as one of the few places on the platform a young Black British actor could carry a major recurring role, is the most obvious reason a sales agent would take the call.

Why a French pair, why now

The decision to anchor Gro(ceries), in Paris is less a creative choice than a financing one. France's genre scene has spent the last decade building the institutional scaffolding for exactly this kind of cross-border bet: CNC top-up support, regional funds in Hauts-de-France and Nouvelle-Aquitaine, and a credible bench of producers who can take an English-language script and stitch it into a Franco-European budget. SCoT(T) and The Project sit comfortably inside that bench, and Frontières' whole purpose is to clear the friction between an English-language script and a French-structured cheque.

The Cannes calendar helps. The Marché du Film concentrates hundreds of sales agents and dozens of public funds in one place for ten days, which compresses the conversation between an actor-led package and a closing financier into something closer to a series of short meetings than a six-month courtship. A project that boards a French co-producer here is, in practice, buying itself a faster path to a greenlight than one that tries to do the same work by email.

The English-language point matters because vampire cinema is, structurally, an English-language genre. What We Do in the Shadows (2014) and its small-screen remake, Interview with the Vampire, Dracula (the various BBC and Netflix versions), all of them live or die on Anglophone performance, on the rhythms of an actor who can land deadpan horror and tragicomedy in the same breath. A vampire comedy that wants to travel to Toronto, Austin and Sitges has to be made, at least in part, in the language the jokes are written in. French money on the production side, English-language performance on the screen.

What remains unfinished

The deal moves the project forward; it does not finish it. Variety's exclusive does not name a director, does not specify a shoot window, and does not put a number on the budget. A sales agent has not been confirmed in the announcement, and neither is the broadcast or streaming partner that would, in most 2026 financing stacks, be expected to take a meaningful piece of the budget in exchange for a first window.

There is also the question of what "vampire self-identity comedy" actually plays like on screen. The premise is doing real work in the pitch, it positions the film as character-led rather than effects-led, which is what most public funds want to hear, and it gives a sales agent a clean logline. But it does not yet tell a buyer whether the film is closer in register to Taika Waititi's vampire mockumentary or to the more melancholy Anne Rice lineage, and that distinction usually decides whether a project lands at a festival, on a streamer, or on a shelf. The cast and the writers' room will decide more of that than the genre label.

The stakes for everyone in the chain

For Ezeudu-Sterling, the project is a test of whether a performer who broke out on a Netflix ensemble can carry a film from the writer's chair as well. For SCoT(T) and The Project, it is a chance to add a marquee Anglophone lead to a slate without paying star-vehicle economics. For Frontières, it is a quietly useful headline: a project that arrived in Cannes incomplete and left with named partners, which is the entire pitch of the market.

For everyone watching European genre financing, the move is a small data point in a much larger pattern. The work of getting a mid-budget English-language genre film made in 2026 increasingly runs through Paris, even when the script is set nowhere near it. Gro(ceries), is the latest deal to use that corridor.

Desk note: Monexus frames this as a financing-chain story rather than a casting announcement. The trade lede is the boarding of two named French producers through a Cannes market that exists specifically to make these matches; the writer-star is the packaging asset, not the news.