Access Entertainment Makes Bad Wolf Investment

LONDON: Access Entertainment, headed by former BBC exec Danny Cohen, has picked up a stake in Bad Wolf, the production venture founded by Jane Tranter and Julie Gardner.

Access has taken a 24.9-percent stake in the outfit, which is currently at work on the forthcoming adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, as well as producing A Discovery of Witches, based on the best-selling novels by Deborah Harkness, and an adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles, among other projects. With offices in South Wales and Los Angeles, Bad Wolf was founded in 2015 by Tranter and Gardner in association with the Welsh government. The Access Entertainment investment will allow Bad Wolf to fast-track its production slate and build its business globally.

“This investment is a fantastic endorsement of our vision for Bad Wolf and the Welsh government’s strategy for the industry,” said Tranter, chief executive of Bad Wolf. “Access Entertainment is a bold and ambitious company who shares our appetite for drama of scale. Joining forces with Len Blavatnik [founder and chairman of Access Industries] and Danny Cohen was absolutely central to our decision. We have had a long and productive relationship with Danny over the years and Len is a true visionary who immediately understood what Bad Wolf stands for. With this partnership, we are supremely well-positioned to take Bad Wolf to the next stage of its expansion.”

Blavatnik added, “We established Access Entertainment to work with the world’s best creative talent and support them in realizing their ambitions. We are delighted to partner with the Bad Wolf team at this critical stage in their development.”

Cohen, president of Access Entertainment, noted, “I’m very excited to be forming this new partnership with Bad Wolf. Jane and Julie are brilliant television executives, highly creative and with an appetite for projects of global scale and impact. I’m very confident that Bad Wolf will produce outstanding work in the coming years—and we are looking forward to going on this journey with them.”

The architect of the deal was Miles Ketley, previously Bad Wolf’s COO who has now become a partner, alongside Christopher Lucas, Tim Connors and Philip Solomons, at the media finance company Stone Story Media. A LinkedIn post from Ketley notes: “Stone Story is an innovative media finance company, which will for the first time offer scalable investment opportunities in global media companies through new structures not previously available to institutional investors.”