BCBusiness

CourtEsy ContinuuM april 2015 BCBusiness 17 SyFy, Netflix, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment and Youku (China's answer to Netflix). "We sold to pretty much every coun- try in the world," Rowe says. Continuum is now wrapping up its fourth and final season, set to air later this year, and while the show could have lasted longer, it had a good run (and plenty of good reviews). In the end, Rowe says, Continuum "will be a profit- able show" for Reunion, which spent $2.4 million an episode to produce it—a far-higher budget than your standard Canadian- made series. The success of Continuum is also good news for Reunion's owner, Vancouver-based Thun- derbird Films. Thunderbird has big ambitions to grow into a major player in the golden age of television, exporting Canadian TV to an international audience. It may just have the dream team— and capital—to pull it off, having partnered with Lionsgate and mining mogul Frank Giustra (who founded Lionsgate in 1997) just prior to its acquisition of Reunion in 2013. As for what's next for locally produced shows, Reunion, for one, has plenty on its plate: first, another show for SyFy, called Olympus, a mythologi- cal fantasy series that premieres later this year. The studio is also travelling back in time with a historical show on the opium trade. Rowe can't name-drop interested net- works yet, but he says the series will be set in Hong Kong and, get this, Victoria. It turns out that in the 1870s, when opium was legal, the drug was B.C.'s third largest export to the U.S. Here's hoping they like our TV as much as they liked our opium. • If I Had a Boat... science fiction and fantasy shows currently being shot in Vancouver premiering in 2015 N u m e r o l o g y by Melissa Edwards Size of the first ship in Seaspan's $11.3-billion piece of the feds' National Shipbuilding Pro- curement Strategy (NSPS), beginning full pro- duction at the company's Vancouver Shipyards this spring. The ship, an offshore fisheries science vessel, will take 18 months to complete and will be fabricated in 40 complete "blocks" that will later be connected. "It's a Swiss Army knife of a ship," says Brian Carter, president of Vancouver Shipyards. "It's forced us to come up to speed with our technical staff and our local supplier base right off the bat." 175 metres S i z E O f t H E j O i n t S u P P O R t S H i P for the navy that begins its 26 months of construction next year, and that will be the largest ship ever built in Western Canada. COntinuuM (ShowC aSe, SyF y ) ARROW ( The C w ) tHE flASH ( The C w ) OnCE uPOn A tiME (aBC) SuPERnAtuRAl ( The C w ) tHE 100 ( The C w ) fAlling SkiES ( TNT ) $435,000,000 E x P E C t E d A n n u A l C O n t R i b u t i O n to B.C.'s gDp during the first 10 years of the nsps. seaspan has so far committed to partnerships with 77 B.C.-based suppliers for the contract and the $170-million shipyard renovation it required. 64 metres 1,000 E x P E C t E d t R A d E W O R k f O R C E at the shipyard by peak production in 2017– up from a previous average of 150. the management team will rise from 20 to about 300 by 2016. GREED OVER GREEN Stanley Park in 2077 if the corporations in Continuum get their way OlyMPuS (SyF y ) tHE WHiSPERS (aBC) tHE REtuRnEd (a&e) izOMbiE ( The C w )

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