The issue of doing business with Russian broadcasters remains a very relevant topic for the international industry. Some companies and organizations have openly declared they are boycotting companies while others not only continue to strike deals but have significantly increased their sales in the country over the seven months of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine.

It has been no secret that Korean companies are among those who continue to cooperate and build business relations with Russian channels. Yesterday, the latest deal became “officially” known.

CTC announced that it will premiere the local version of The Masked Dancer on October 9. The show has been scheduled in the Sunday 17.00 slot.

The channel the jury panel will include Sergey Svetlakov and Yegor Druzhinin, judges of the first season of the show Dance Off on TNT, as well as Timur Rodriguez, who previously guessed the identities of the participants in The Masked Singer on NTV. They will also be joined by singer Klava Koka. The name of the fifth member of the jury and the host of the project will remain unknown until the premiere episode.

As the representative of CTC told Sostav, it took four months to create images of the characters of the show - the project artists made bright voluminous costumes in which participants can breathe, move easily and perform choreographic movements and acrobatic stunts. It took more than two months to make the sets, and 21 days to assemble them.

As the authors of the project clarified, Mask Dances is the first Russian version of The Masked Dancer, a spin-off of the famous The Masked Singer. The production of the show will be done by WeiT Media. Previously, CTC cooperated with the company on the reality show The Biggest Loser, as well as the culinary shows MasterChef and MasterChef Junior.

CEETV got in touch with the managers of MBC which owns the rights to The Masked Dancer. They confirmed that a deal for the format was signed with Weit Media in January this year and later the show was commissioned by CTC.

The MBC Global Media management remained silent to the following request for comment:

“We would also like to know about the official position of your company regarding doing business with Russian broadcasters. We have seen that a lot of companies from South Korea (which has also imposed sanctions against the Russian Federation) continue to do and actually grow their business there.

Are you not concerned that other companies and organizations which have stopped doing business with Russia might start boycotting your company and content because of these facts?”

CEETV also got in touch with Fremantle which holds the rights to The Masked Dancer for some European territories and the company stated that they have stopped sales to Russia and they never had the rights to the show for Russia.