EXCLUSIVE: French-language drama series The Hunt (Traqués) will debut on Apple TV on March 4. That is three months after the acquired series from Gaumont was slated to premiere on Dec. 3 but was delayed, with the French production company launching an investigation into claims that the show may have been plagiarized.
In a statement, Gaumont laid out the sequence of events and revealed the outcome of its review related to the series’ IP.
Originally scheduled for December 2025, The Hunt‘s release was postponed after it was identified in November 2025 that the project, presented as an original work, was based on an existing work, Douglas Fairbairn’s Shoot.
As soon as this information came to its attention, Gaumont, the series’ producer, immediately took the necessary steps to identify the rights holders, and obtain the required authorizations.
Respect for works and authors’ rights is a fundamental principle for Gaumont, which can only be exercised with the trust and transparency of creative artists.
The last part is a likely reference to The Hunt‘s director Cédric Anger who was originally credited as creator of the series when it was sold to Apple TV as an original project. Once Apple was made aware of plot similarities between The Hunt and Fairbairn’s 1973 novel Shoot (as well as the 1976 U.S./Canadian movie of the same name), the streamer notified Gaumont while putting the show’s release on hold two weeks before its scheduled debut.
The similarities were clearly significant as The Hunt is now billed as “a series by Anger based on the novel Shoot by Douglas Fairbairn, which was first adapted into a feature film of the same name, directed by Harvey Hart from a screenplay by Richard Berg.”
The adjustment follows deals that Gaumont has made with the rights holders of the book and film. (Fairbairn died in 1997).
Information about the show, which had been removed following the original premiere date delay, has now been restored on Apple’s site and the app with the revised credits.
In The Hunt, Franck (Benoît Magimel) and his longtime friends enjoy spending their weekends hunting together, but one Sunday, they come across another group of hunters who start targeting them without explanation. When one of their party is shot, Franck’s friends strike back, sending an attacker to the ground. Barely managing to escape, the four friends keep the event a secret. Franck tries to go back to his life as usual alongside his wife Krystel (Mélanie Laurent), but in the next few days, he starts to feel like he and his friends are being watched, or worse, tracked by hunters who are now hell-bent on revenge.
Damien Bonnard, Manuel Guillot, Cédric Appietto and Frédéric Maranber also star.
The six-episode, one-hour series is executive produced by Sidone Dumas, Isabelle Degeorges, Clémentine Vaudaux and Alexis Barqueiro, through Gaumont. (This is the same quartet of EPs as before.) Anger directs five episodes, and Guillaume Renusson directs Episode 3. The first two episodes of The Hunt will debut globally on March 4, followed by one new episode every Wednesday through April 1.
