The company - 100% owned since May 2006 by Norwegian media group Schibsted - has decided to concentrate on film distribution and to be involved only in Swedish co-productions, putting an end to 70 years of Swedish film production which had its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s.
"It has become harder and harder to make the production of Swedish films profitable," confessed Birgitta Holmar, managing director for Sandrew Metronome Sweden to Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
Lena Rehnberg, head of production at SM since 2001, said that the problem comes from Schibsted and its quick profit-led philosophy. "Schibsted is a stock company with absolutely no interest in film production. They don't understand that film production is a slow business where it can take two to three years before getting any money back."
During her time at SM, Rehnberg produced four feature films (including God Save the King by Ulf Malmros, winner of a Guldbagge Award for Best Director in 2006, and Sunstorm. She co-produced nine films such as Malmros' We Can be Heroes (2002) and Slim Susie (2003), Mårten Klingberg's Offside (2006), the European co-production The Front Line by David Gleeson (2006) and Ciao Bella by Mani Maseratt-Agah (2007).
Released last Friday on 90 screens, Sunstorm is currently second at the Swedish top ten chart with 43,500 admissions in four days. The thriller starring Izabella Scorupco and Mikael Persbrandt is based on Åsa Larsson's best-selling novels. "I haven't decided yet what to do next, but the good thing is that I can take my projects with me, which includes the rights to two other books by Åsa Larsson," noted Rehnberg who was Sweden's Producer on the Move in 2005.