Netflix ANZ will work with Tony Ayres Productions, Easy Tiger, and Ronde on two new drama series, and has greenlit a documentary on drill rap group ONEFOUR as part of its next phase of Australian production.
The streamer has also acquired Adrian Powers’ rom-com Love is in the Air, starring Delta Goodrem and Steph Tisdell, with the Jaggi Entertainment production to premiere on the platform on September 28.
Of the series titles, pre-production has begun on Desert King, an outback drama from Easy Tiger and Ronde about the succession battle for control of the world’s largest cattle station, at the centre of which is the Lawson family. With generational clashes threatening to tear the family apart, the outback’s most powerful factions – rival cattle barons, desert gangsters, Indigenous elders and billionaire miners – move in for the kill.
Created by Tim Lee and Ben Davies, Desert King will be produced by Paul Ranford and directed by Greg McLean, with Easy Tiger’s Ian Collie and Rob Gibson executive producing alongside Davies.
Fellow drama The Survivors brings another story from The Dry author Jane Harper to the screen. Based on her book of the same name, the Tony Ayres Productions series details the impact of a storm that took the lives of three young people in the fictional Tasmanian seaside town of Evelyn Bay. Fifteen years later, the respective families of the deceased, as well as the community of friends, and the very town itself, became haunted and defined by these immeasurable losses. As yet, no other details have been announced in relation to the project.
With ONEFOUR: Against All Odds, Netflix ANZ makes its second foray into factual, following last year’s docusoap Byron Baes. Written and directed by Gabriel Gasparinatos, the film tracks the meteoric rise of the Sydney-based, Pacific Islander kids who start recording drill raps to avoid a life of crime, only for a police task force to shut down their sold-out national tour due to concerns that the group’s music will incite violence. Gasparinatos produces alongside Entropico’s Erin Moy and Stranger Than Fiction’s Jennifer Peedom and Sarah Noonan on the project, which will premiere later this year.
The four new titles join an upcoming slate that includes the second seasons of Heartbreak High and Surviving Summer, along with Trent Dalton adaption Boy Swallows Universe and animated children’s series Eddie’s Little Homies.
According to Netflix ANZ director of content Que Minh Luu, being able to provide a “hugely diverse” range of titles was a key priority for the local branch of the company.
“We’re trying to figure out what Australian stories are going to work best for Netflix and that’s a very different thing to what’s out there on free-to-air, Amazon, or YouTube,” she said.
“So it’s really a shared journey of working it out together. As our slate continues to grow and we’re trying to find ways to scale more and build capacity, it’s been extraordinary seeing what people are coming to us with. [The projects] are continually being honed and coming to us with a real specificity as well which is exciting to see.”
The slate announcement comes as the streamer is faced with calls for change, both domestically and internationally.
One of the key issues for writers and actors in the ongoing labour disputes in the US is the calculation of residual pay from services such as Netflix.
The SAG AFTRA strike has paused production on Australian-based projects, such as Universal’s Apples Never Fall and Mortal Kombat 2, while also leading Roadshow to delay the Australia and New Zealand release of Robert Connolly’s Force of Nature: The Dry 2. The second season of Surviving Summer, led by US actress Sky Katz, had already completed filming when the strike was announced and was therefore not impacted.
Luu said while her team was being “really careful” in doing their due diligence, it was mostly business as usual.
“Ultimately these are local shows and we are very focused on what we’re trying to program locally,” she said.
“If we get that local show and that local story right, that’s the key to kind of reaching a global audience. That’s what happened with Heartbreak High and Wellmania, and that’s what’s happening with Fisk at the moment.”
Domestically, Netflix is set to come under local content quotas by this time next year, with the government in consultation with stakeholders about the shape of the revenue obligation to be introduced by July 1, 2024.
While the road towards regulation has spanned multiple governments and submission processes, Luu said it was important to remember that everyone involved in conversation “essentially wants the same thing”.
“We’re all driven by this purpose of wanting to make local content,” she said.
“If Netflix wasn’t serious about local content, they wouldn’t have hired a local team. I’ve been really lucky to be able to just focus on that, and however [the regulation] conversations play out, the remit remains to make incredible Australian shows that really centre on what audiences want to see . . . and we’ve got to do that by making shows that are for us, about us, and by us.
“Our path to doing that is to strive to be the best partner to the Australian creative community but at the same time, we’ve got to think about how we scale and a lot of that is about capacity building.”