What’s going on with that Phoebe Waller-Bridge Amazon deal?
What do you consider a lot of money? The answer will be highly subjective and probably reveal a lot about you—but unless you’re an American or Russian oligarch, chances are, $100 million sounds like an awful lot.
As it happens, that’s how much Amazon has reportedly paid Phoebe Waller-Bridge since signing a ‘golden handcuffs’ deal with her in 2019. While the term typically refers to a studio locking an artist into an exclusive agreement, it’s starting to look like it’s the other way around.
In the six years since that contract was signed, Waller-Bridge has produced just one project: a two-part documentary about an octopus called… Octopus! It comes out on May 8th, if you want to set an alert on your calendar.
When Amazon snagged the deal with Waller-Bridge, it looked like the savviest studio in town. It closed on the agreement less than 48 hours after Waller-Bridge’s series, Fleabag, took home six Emmys. The deal stated that Waller-Bridge would create and produce television content for the streamer, but it must not have specified a minimum output.
At the time, Amazon executive Jennifer Salke gushed that Waller-Bridge was “clever, brilliant, generous and a virtuoso on multiple fronts including writing, acting and producing,” and said that Amazon was “excited for what comes next from this brilliant mind to dazzle and delight our global audience.” It’s safe to say that fans of Fleabag were equally excited about Waller-Bridge’s next steps.
She was and presumably remains a wildly charismatic performer and brilliant writer, a rare combination Hollywood sorely lacks. Fleabag struck a chord with its dark, toe-curlingly awkward humour and relatably hapless protagonist. The idea that Waller-Bridge would be given a blank cheque to dream up whatever stories she wanted was thrilling for fans of her show, which has only made the vacuum of the past six years all the more disappointing.
There have been plenty of announcements in the interim. The first was a series version of Mr & Mrs Smith, which she was set to write and star in with Donald Glover. But that fell apart when the two stars allegedly had creative differences, and Glover ultimately got his way. Waller-Bridge left the project, and Maya Erskine stepped in to play her role. She went off to work on a few projects outside the Amazon wheelhouse, including helping write the screenplay for Daniel Craig’s final Bond foray, No Time to Die and starring in an Indiana Jones movie.
Then, it was announced that Waller-Bridge was working on a Tomb Raider series for Amazon that would star Game of Thrones actor Sophie Turner. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2023, the writer said that she was obsessed with the video game as a teenager and saw the series as the culmination of her career thus far. Having appeared in the Indiana Jones franchise and worked on Bond, it felt like fate when Amazon brought her the idea.
“God, it literally felt like that teenager in me saying: Do right by her, do right by Lara!” she recalled, saying that the opportunity brought up “big roaring instincts” in her. “It’s such a wonderful feeling to think you know what to do,” she added. Two years later, this project also seems to have fizzled. In March, Puck News reported that Tomb Raider had “gone through two writers’ rooms and tens of millions of dollars in development costs” with nothing to show for it. Some outlets even reported that the project had been shelved.
Despite this inauspicious development, Amazon renewed its deal with Waller-Bridge earlier this month, though the terms have been watered down to a first-look deal rather than an exclusive one. This is the first time since the deal was established back in 2019 that Amazon has all but admitted that it might have gotten out over its skis with its astronomical financial commitment to the writer.
Over the past six years, the streamer has had plenty to say on the matter, concocting dense sentences of placation and praise. In October last year, Salke offered Variety the first signs of doubt, saying that the company was planning to convert deals like the one with Waller-Bridge “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.”
When the original multi-million dollar deal was renewed for the first time in 2022, an executive told The Hollywood Reporter that Amazon’s strategy could be described as “star fucking”—indiscriminately showering creators with money without working out a plan to make sure they followed through. If that’s the case, it seems like a misnomer. If anything, Waller-Bridge is guilty of studio fucking, which I am hereby defining as signing a lucrative deal with a predatory corporation and, like Robin Hood himself, bleeding them dry for every penny they’re worth. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Phoebe Waller-Bridge is the hero we need in 2025, even if it means that we won’t get to enjoy any of her genius anytime soon—Octopus documentary aside, of course.
