Italy’s Leone Film Group, the company founded by Spaghetti Western master Sergio Leone, has been on a roaring roll since 2012. That’s when his children, Raffaella and Andrea, who now run the company, spotted a theatrical distribution gap left open by Medusa and Rai Cinema and stepped in to swiftly sign an output deal with DreamWorks. This, in turn, propelled its expansion.

The two Leone siblings hadn’t been idle before then. They were already among the top distributors of TV movies in Italy, having delved into that market in 1989, the year their father founded the company. That was also the year that Leone Sr. died. In those days, driven by Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset, Italian TV was flourishing, recalls Andrea. “For us, movies are a passion; but at the same time they are business,” he says. During that period, “there was serious opportunity to do business in that segment.”