You might have caught the news this week. Then again, you might not: on May 8, Prime Video launched its latest nature docuseries.
Titled Octopus!, it was a deep dive into the marine world of — you guessed it – the humble cephalopod. But the thing that made most of us sit up? The whole thing was produced and narrated by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Now. It’s been some time since Waller-Bridge was in the spotlight, but the last we properly heard from her, it was 2019. She had just signed a very, very lucrative “golden handcuffs” deal with Amazon, for exclusive rights to any television content she would produce going forward. Over the course of five years, she would be paid a staggering $100m ($20m dollars a year) for the exclusive rights to whatever came out of her brain.
At the time, it made sense. This was a moment when Waller-Bridge was riding high on the success of Fleabag, the Edinburgh Fringe show-turned fourth wall breaking BBC hit – as well as Killing Eve, the smash hit follow-up that shot Jodie Comer to fame as the assassin Villanelle.
Amazon sealed the deal with her 48 hours after Fleabag took home six Emmys; on the face of things, this must have seemed like an excellent investment. At the time, Amazon’s executive Jennifer Salke praised Waller-Bridge for being “clever, brilliant, generous and a virtuoso on multiple fronts including writing, acting and producing.”
But the deal appears to have soured. The streamer never specified how much content Waller-Bridge would be obliged to produce, and the answer has been… one. For the avoidance of doubt, yes, that would be Octopus! (the exclamation mark is important).
There have also been a couple of misfires in the meantime. In 2021, it was announced that she would be writing and starring in a TV adaptation of the hit 2005 film Mr and Mrs Smith (yes, the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie one).
That fell apart when she allegedly fell out with her co-writer and co-star Donald Glover over creative differences; Maya Erskine eventually nabbed the role of Mrs Smith and Glover stayed. In 2023, Waller-Bridge told Vanity Fair that “I worked on that show for six months fully in heart and mind and really cared about it — still care about it. And I know it’s gonna be brilliant. But sometimes it’s about knowing when to leave the party. You don’t want to get in the way of a vision.”
In the meantime, Waller-Bridge kept busy. She went off and starred in an Indiana Jones film (remember that?) and was brought on to do some much-publicised tweaks for James Bond’s last outing No Time To Die (Michael G Wilson later told BBC Radio 4 that “she gave us an interesting point-of-view for several of the characters,” and “it’s unfair to think of her as a female writer…she contributed to the whole plot of the film”).
There were also a few ripples of excitement when news of a new Lara Croft TV series was announced – a perfect fit for Waller-Bridge, who had been an obsessive Tomb Raider fan in her youth.
“God, it literally felt like that teenager in me saying: Do right by her, do right by Lara!” she told Vanity Fair about the making of the project. “It’s such a wonderful feeling to think you know what to do.”
Sophie Turner was tapped to play the titular Tomb Raider; things seemed to be progressing. And then, it all went quiet. In March, Puck News reported that the show had “gone through two writers’ rooms and tens of millions of dollars in development costs”. The Mail later reported that the project was “dead.” One thing’s for certain: for whatever reason, we’re not going to see it anytime soon.
What has Amazon had to say about the whole thing? The corporation seems determined to save face – so much so that it has actually renewed the deal twice: once in 2022 and again this year.
To be honest, good for her. In terms of making a corporation bleed, this has to be one of the most audacious storylines ever put to paper. And in this era of global mega-streamers, it looks as though Waller-Bridge is making Jeff Bezos shell out for essentially doing not even the bare minimum - a testament to how badly Amazon’s strategy of what one showrunner described as “star-fucking” has gone.
It’s not just Amazon, of course. Other examples could include Meghan and Harry for Netflix, or the South Park creators, all of whom delivered on less than their multi-multi-million pound exclusivity contracts might suggest (the South Park creators signed a $500m deal with Warner Discovery for 30 new episodes of the show in 2019, but ultimately less than half of that ever made it to air).
Perhaps as a result, things do seem to be changing. In October, Salke explained that Amazon was going to change the structure of its deals “to a very performance-based model, based on what they accomplish. And that’s been received very well because you’ve got to change with the times.”
All of which is to say that perhaps Waller-Bridge’s days of riding the gravy train will be over soon. And thank goodness for that – perhaps once she’s freed from those golden handcuffs, she might finally have the creative freedom to do something ground-breaking again.
In the meantime, there’s always Octopus!
