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.

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.