Responding to Bob (below), I happened to see your comment. Apologies for not responding any earlier.
Fantasy is a genre that has very few originals. Because of its cost (historically) movies are almost always based on bestselling fantasy IP.

In case of published work, unless the author is a bestseller, producers will sit and wait to see the performance of a novel before engaging with the writer.
If your book sells well, that’s valuable leverage to start a conversation.

This is largely the case in many European countries as well. To a certain degree, we are talking about state cinema, with the inevitable danger of croneyism.

One example. A few years ago, I read in the trade press that a distribution company in Sydney was moving into production. So I emailed them, told them who I was, and asked them to read a writing sample. Which they did. I subsequently met up with them, and they commissioned me to write a treatment based on an idea of theirs. They also encouraged me to send them anything else I wrote, which is what I’ve been doing.

If you phoned them today, I’m sure they’d say ‘no unsolicited material’.

2) ‘Production companies are not providing a public service…’ Well, yes, but many of them are doing what they do with public money. The Australian film industry would not exist in its current form without the federal and state funding bodies, and without the Producer Offset.

The funding bodies make it all but impossible for writers to approach them without a producer attached to the project. While I’m not against this in principle, in practice it often means producers working with writers they already know, rather than seeking out anyone new. In the States, a development executive who passed on someone who turned out to be the Next Big Thing would most likely be fired. In Australia, with the commercial imperative removed, this is an extra barrier that new writers have to overcome.