Fortiche Production SAS is a French animation studio headquartered in Paris. It is known for the hit television series Arcane.
Development
Fortiche Production SAS was founded in 2009 and initially created commercials for Coca-Cola, Honda, Samsung, Panasonic and MTV. From the start, a combination of 2D and 3D animation has defined the studio's style, the "Touche Fortiche".[1]
They moved on to creating music videos for Freak Kitchen, Gorillaz and LIMOUSINE. These projects caught the attention of video game studios such as Ubisoft, Volition Studios, Carbine Studios and Riot Games.[2] For the latter, Fortiche produced game trailers in the form of short films along with music videos, most notably Pop/Stars.[3]
In 2015, the French channel France 2 broadcast the 55-minute historical documentary film Le dernier Gaulois about the Gallic Wars animated by Fortiche. Motion Capture technology was used for this.[4]
At the 2017 industry fair Cartoon Movie in Bordeaux, the studio pitched the feature film project Miss Saturne with a pilot short film.[5]
Arcane
In November 2021, Fortiche, in collaboration with Riot Games, released the series Arcane set in the League of Legends-universe on the streaming platforms Netflix and in China on Tencent Video. It was the world's most-watched series on Netflix for two weeks in November 2021 and was extremely well received by critics.[6][7]
During the six year creation of Arcane, staff numbers grew from around 15 to around 300.[8] The studio expanded in 2020 with branches in Montpellier and Las Palmas. The studio's revenue rose to €16.4 million for 2021.[9]Le Figaro reported that the budget of Arcane was €60–80 million.[10] In November 2021 Riot-Games-CEO Nicolo Laurent announced via Twitter that a second season was commissioned from Fortiche.[11] The second and final season premiered on November 9, 2024 and concluded on November 23.
On March 14, 2022, Riot Games announced a new equity investment in Fortiche Production.[12] Under the terms of the investment, Riot now holds a significant non-controlling stake in Fortiche. Brian Wright (Chief Content Officer at Riot) and Brendan Mulligan (Director of Corporate Development at Riot) have also joined Fortiche's board of directors.[13]
