Some ‘Glee’ at Netflix — it gets top producer
Netflix has won yet another battle against old Hollywood.
On Tuesday night, the Los Gatos company announced that it had poached hit-making producer Ryan Murphy from 21st Century Fox.
The five-year deal is worth as much as $300 million, according to two people with knowledge of the agreement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations. That would be one of the biggest deals ever made for a television producer.
While the agreement will disappoint the studio where Murphy has spent most of his career, it also delivers a serious blow to the Walt Disney Co., which reached a deal in December to acquire most of 21st Century Fox for $52.4 billion.
Murphy’s contract with Fox expires in the summer, and he will move to Netflix in July.
The prolific producer behind “Glee,” “Nip/ Tuck” and the anthology series “American Crime Story” and “American Horror Story,” Murphy would have been a key piece in the expanded Disney empire, and Fox executives made several attempts to keep him in the corporate family. Amazon also courted him seriously, which played a role in driving up the price for the 52-year-old writer, director and producer from Indianapolis.
“This history of this moment is not lost on me,” Murphy said in a statement. “I am a gay kid from Indiana who moved to Hollywood in 1989 with $55 in savings in my pocket, so the fact that my dreams have crystallized and come true in such a major way is emotional and overwhelming to me.”
Paving the way for Murphy to make the jump to streaming was the $100 million deal Netflix reached in August with producer Shonda Rhimes, the creator of the ABC series “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal.” Rhimes had been with Disney’s ABC network for a decade and made the move days after Disney announced that it would expand its streaming offerings and eventually pull many of its products from Netflix.
The moment was certainly right for someone like Murphy to find himself in the final months of a contract. The Hollywood economy is buzzing, with fast-moving digital disrupters taking on the studios that have been dependable providers of mass entertainment since the silent-movie era.
Apple and Amazon have lately joined Netflix and Hulu in moving aggressively to sign heavyweight creators and entertainers, and the old-line companies are in danger of losing relevance if they do not put up a fight against their new, freespending rivals. Netflix, which began offering original programming in 2012, has said it will spend as much as $8 billion on content this year, and Apple has pledged at least $1 billion for original programming.
The upshot is that proven showrunners and big stars are in an enviable bargaining position.
A factor in Murphy’s decision to join Netflix was the uncertainty brought on by the agreement between Disney and Fox. He had close working relationships with Peter Rice, the president of 21st Century Fox; Dana Walden, the chairwoman of Fox’s TV group (and the godmother to Murphy’s children); and John Landgraf, the chief executive of the FX network, a cable channel under the Fox banner.
If the Disney-Fox deal wins governmental approval, as expected, it is not a sure thing that those executives will stay in their roles. Rice said at the Code Media conference Tuesday that he didn’t know whether he would remain with the company after the planned merger went through.