Fifth Season Fully Acquires The Story Collective

Fifth Season has fully acquired A Thousand Blows producer The Story Collective, which it backed with a minority investment when the label initially launched in 2021.

As a result, co-founder Simon Vaughan will be leaving to open a new studio. Fellow co-founder Damian Keogh will remain as CEO and take on the additional role of senior VP and managing director of international scripted for Fifth Season.

Ben Irving will continue to serve as senior VP and creative director of international scripted. A consolidated senior leadership team will collaborate across both slates.

Vaughan’s new studio, Storyworks, already has a first-look deal in place with Fifth Season, and it will work with The Story Collective on several preexisting projects.

“We set the company up to partner with great creative talent and producers wholeheartedly and with a patient, nurturing and supportive ethos,” Keough said. “We really believe in the team sport of it all and are proud of the roster of people and projects we have assembled in our Collective. Fifth Season has always recognized and encouraged our approach, and it’s a natural and exciting next step to be joining forces, and I am looking forward to working more closely with Graham, Ben and other Fifth Season colleagues.”

“It is exciting to see The Story Collective being consolidated within Fifth Season to help deliver the scaled enterprise we all set out to build together when we formed the company four years ago,” added Vaughan. “And also exciting for my new venture to be partnering with Fifth Season from the off—the projects on our combined slates going forward are truly extraordinary, and I sense that the best is yet to come.”

“The Story Collective was built by Damian, Simon and Helen [Jackson] on an ethos of creative collaboration, which we backed and have admired from its inception—and it feels like a natural evolution to be consolidating in this way four years later, as we double down on our ambitions as a U.K. studio,” commented Graham Taylor, CEO of Fifth Season. “Fifth Season’s offering now has even greater firepower and an undeniable nexus of talent connections and projects to put our weight behind.”