Yahoo News Will Arnett Inks First Look Deal With Fox Entertainment
Fox Entertainment CEO Rob Wade is getting deeper into business with Will Arnett.
“We’ve got a new deal set with Will. He’s been phenomenal on Lego Masters. We’ve developed a few other shows with him. He’s just a great guy. And he’s Canadian. He’s a nice guy,” Wade said Monday at the Banff World Media Festival during a Summit Series keynote as he unveiled an overall deal with the prolific actor and his Electric Avenue Productions banner as part of an overall producing deal. The agreement calls for Arnett to exclusively develop unscripted content for Fox.
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The pact also includes a first-look agreement on scripted series developed by Electric Avenue to be produced by Fox Entertainment Studios. Arnett’s deal with Fox comes as studios look to sign top talent to feed their content pipelines, but as streaming giants see their content budgets come under pressure after the Peak TV bubble burst.
Wade oversees the Fox Network, an in-house unscripted studio Fox Alternative Entertainment, the scripted-focused Fox Entertainment Studios, among other production assets. As part of their deal with Fox, Arnett and Marc Forman of Electric Avenue will executive produce all series that get a green light.
Arnett has had earlier production deals at CBS and Sony TV, and his credits include hosting and executive producing Fox’s competition series Lego Masters, set to return for a fifth season. He is repped by CAA, Artists First, and Sloane, Offer, Weber & Dern.
During his keynote address, Wade recalled when, as Fox’s reality TV head, being tapped by Lachlan Murdoch to become CEO of Fox Entertainment around 18 months ago. “Taking over an organization with the legacy and scale of Fox was daunting… But I’m a sucker for a challenge,” Wade said.
He also addressed his entertainment studio recently restructuring across three key business segments – entertainment, television and streaming platforms, and worldwide sales and licensing. “That’s the spirit of Fox. It’s in our DNA to be nimble, to do things that other people can’t do and we’ve gotten back to a more traditional structure now,” Wade argued.
He also rejected any notion that the traditional TV business faces doom and gloom in the streaming era, where major online platforms are seeing their content expenditures come under pressure in a drive for elusive profitability. “The business model on which the streamers had tried to disrupt the business has been proved to not have worked, right? It didn’t work,” Wade told Banff delegates.
In a post-Peak TV era, he added Fox had shed the need for expensive pilots and was handing out straight-to-series deal, as with the order for the medical procedural drama Doc, based on an Italian format. The U.S. adaptation also has a female lead, Dr. Amy Elias, chief of internal and family medicine at a Minneapolis hospital who is recovering from a brain injury that wiped out the last eight years of her memory.
Wade said the female lead contrasts with American media dramas where the signature leads are usually men. “We like to call them, get ready for it, sexy rebels,” he said of female leads in new Fox dramas.
Wade also argued talent agents and managers had to be more realistic about what talent can expect to be paid, otherwise performing series will get the chop as Fox looks to reduce series costs. “When you’re looking at a show that is doing great ratings, but it’s too expensive, you have to think, well, is there an opportunity to replace it with something with a more modern and dynamic business model,” he questioned.
After his keynote, Wade told The Hollywood Reporter that rival media giants needed to partner to help keep down content costs and create a more sustainable business model for the TV industry. Here he pointed to Fox Corp., The Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros. Discovery teaming up on a new company that combines streaming sports rights.
“It’s good for the consumer, it’s good for the companies. Partnerships aren’t new. Think about the cable bundle. That was just a partnership between different companies,” Wade explained. He also touted a partnership with Hulu to see a slew of Fox programming run on the streaming platform.
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