Blue Ant Studios announced Monday it has entered into a co-funding partnership with Australian independent producer WildBear Entertainment, resulting in 18 hours of new factual content greenlit for production.
The news was announced at the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers in Marrakesh, Morrocco.
Encompassing three new factual series, all scheduled for delivery in the third quarter of 2025, the deal was brokered by Lilla Hurst, global head of acquisitions and content strategy at Blue Ant Studios, and WildBear Entertainment’s representative, Edwina Thring of Wild Thring Media.
WildBear Entertainment has recently gone into production on each series, led by company CEO and executive producer Michael Tear. Blue Ant Studios will retain worldwide distribution rights, and Hurst will serve as an executive producer on each series.
“As both a creative and financial partner with producers and buyers around the world, Blue Ant Studios is committed to finding new ways of working and investing in different financial models to bring great content into the marketplace and onto the screen,” Mark Bishop, co-president of Blue Ant Studios, said in a press release. “Having already acquired numerous completed WildBear titles for international distribution, we know that its programming is extremely well-produced and always in demand. So, while greenlighting these 18 hours could be considered a risk, working with a trusted partner like WildBear mitigates that risk and ensures we continue to fuel our pipeline with the sort of great factual series that buyers are seeking.”
“We are delighted to be working so closely with Blue Ant Studios in this way, sharing the potential risk — and, hopefully, the upside,” WildBear Entertainment’s Tear said in a statement. “It is wonderful to have such backing from Lilla and the team. This support not only demonstrates confidence in our productions but also greatly speeds up the process and allows us to quickly get series into the marketplace at a time when commissioning decisions are being made rather slowly.”
The three new series that have been greenlit are a mix of history and engineering titles.
Secrets of the Lost Cities (6 episodes x 60 minutes) uses the latest science, leading experts and high-end graphics “to explore the world’s most ancient and mysterious cities, looking to discover the secrets of their power and the reasons for their downfall,” reads a description in the press release. Each episode focuses on one region with a featured city examined in detail and secondary stories about additional cities in the area.
As the 80th anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg trials approaches in November 2025, the new series World War II: History on Trial (6 x 60 minutes) will explore the courtroom trials that took place in Germany, Japan and other countries across the 20th century. The series “will examine the arguments made by the Allies and Axis powers and, by doing so, provide fresh insights into the trajectory of the Second World War,” the release says. It “will also explore how these events reverberate to this day as the complicated questions of responsibility and justice continue to be debated.”
Engineering by Catastrophe (6 x 60 minutes) looks at the construction of some of the world’s latest and most failsafe structures, such as the buildings, dams, stadiums, container ships and bridges that incorporate the very latest in engineering science to overcome previous disasters. “As each safety feature is built into the structure, the series relives the historical disasters that we learned from to make each safer — including the floods, fires, tornadoes and bombs that have taught engineers how to build better,” a synopsis says.
Photos of (l-r) Mark Bishop and Michael Tear courtesy of Blue Ant Studios
