SHEEP DETECTIVES: THE AUSTRALIAN VERSION

A few weeks ago, on a week when we had no Australian films released at all, I did something a bit different. I looked at the top 25 films in Australian cinemas for the 2026 year so far and went down the list asking, of each, could we have made this here?

It was meant to be a one-off. But I noticed something while I was doing it. Obviously these are the kind of films Australian’s turn up for. The exhibitors are constantly saying “we’d support Australian films if they were ‘better’. Whatever that means. I kept running each film past the same handful of questions, almost without thinking. Could the story be ours without breaking? Where would the money come from? Who would direct it? Who would star in it? And if we made it, would anyone get behind it?

That’s not a one-off. That’s a way of thinking. So I’m making it a regular thing.

I’m going to take one film each week (hopefully regularly on a Monday) and work it through properly: if we’d wanted to make this in Australia, how would we, and what would have to be true for it to happen. This is the WHAT IF series coming back in a new coat. I’ve missed doing it, and this scratches the same itch, asking what could be, and using a real film to stay specific instead of hand-wavy.

Setting the tone for everything that follows - this isn’t a lament. I’m not interested in “why don’t we make films like this,” which usually curdles into “why aren’t our films better,” and I think that question is mostly wrong anyway.

The films themselves are rarely the problem. As we discussed the USA makes shit films too. We just don’t get to see them here in Australia. What’s interesting is the thinking upstream of them: what we choose to make, how we fund it, and whether we get to own what we make. In that list there were a whole bunch of films that we couldn’t or shouldn’t of made here - or they should be made just utilising our PDV/Location Offset. That’s fine. The part I care about is the turn after it. If not this, then what could we make here, with the same instinct, that would be ours.

And I want your companionship in this. I don’t have every answer, and on some of these films I’m well outside my own patch. So please get into the comments. Tell me where I’m wrong, give me the names and the numbers I’m missing, tell me how you’d have made it differently. That’s the whole point. This works far better as a conversation than a column.

So, week one.

This was number 16 on the list at the time having made $5.6m in Australia. As of Friday the 5th June it’s sitting at #15 - $6,903,151 with 474,520 Australian’s having bought tickets.

It’s a talking-animal family comedy, a whole flock of sheep trying to solve their shepherd’s murder, fronted by Hugh Jackman and a huge ensemble, and it is the clearest descendant of Babe I’ve seen in years. Which makes it the ideal place to begin, because Babe is ours. We made the film that more or less wrote the modern rulebook for putting talking animals on screen. So if there’s any title on that list we ought to be able to picture making here, it’s this one.

And yet. The moment I started thinking it through properly, I hit a wall before we’d shot a single frame. So that’s where we start.

This film is based off a German book published in 2005. This synopsis is wild and I’ll be honest I think if I had read the book I’m not sure it would have sprung to mind as a family friendly film like Babe. It’s having taste that comes from experience to know that you could turn this into a family freindly film. I hope as a newer producer I’m doing what I can to start building those taste muscles.

I will go and read the book and will come back with a note about the difference in tone that I percieve from the synopsis. The first thing I noticed being in the book Farmer George is stabbed with a shovel but in the film he’s poisened - far less visually gruesome - which makes sense for a family film.

On IMDBPro four companies are listed – Three Strange Angels, Lord Miller, Working Title and Amazon MGM Studios. It stars Hugh Jackman, Emma Thompson, Nicholas Braun and a varied incredible cast of voices. It was filmed in the UK, by first-time live-action director - Kyle Balda (but he has directed a couple of the Minions films, worked at Pixar and ILM as an animator including on some live action films).

To start with – how much do you reckon the book would have cost to option?

Last time I optioned a book it was for a tv series and it was about $5000 for 2 years. BUT this was 15 years ago and the author was an acquaintance and it was a book that was on some best seller lists but not widely known. I would love to know if anyone has done it recently what the going rate is. I’m guessing the sky the limit with a really well known book. And to be fair a lot of books are optioned before they even go out to print.

When you are known as a producer who options books and gets them made into films you are going to be targeted specifically – like I imagine Bruna Papandrea is.

I think Books at Miff does a really good job of building relationships between producers and publishers – I’ve really enjoyed the various times I’ve been, have read some great books that I think would make great films or series but never financially been in the position to option them. And now I’m being a little bit more strategic again with the current book I’m looking at. I’ve been sent some ARC’s (Advance Reader Copies) in the past but as a newer producer my ability to read as many books as I’d like whilst working fulltime on productions and getting my next project financed is limited (and now doing this newsletter! HA HA) but we have instilled in our home a habit of 30mins quiet reading before bed with our kids. For a long time I’ve been using that 30mins to catch up on work emails but now I get a book out and read with them too.

Anyway … From what I can see it was optioned by Producer Lindsay Doran who took it to Craig Mazin to write. There’s a 2015 Scriptnotes podcast where Craig talks about sending a rewrite off to Lindsay Doran so I’m guessing that they have been working on it a long time. Who knows how many years at that point? For a film shot in 2024 that’s at 10 years of option agreements if not more – plus the writers fees for however many drafts were done in that time. That would have got expensive. Where does Lindsay get the money from to option the book and then pay a writer like Craig. And how do we find that equivilant in Australia?

That’s the first thing I’m thinking about as an Australian independent producer. Although we have the incredible development funding from Screen Australia and state agencies – you are never going to get enough to cover this kind of costs over this time period and I do really believe this is why Australian films tend to get rushed into production.

And the book itself is German, not Australian, which quietly adds a layer before you’ve spent a dollar: would Agency’s even fund developing foreign IP (I’m guessing hte answer is yes as long as it’s owned by Australians), and does a story like this only really work in Australia as an Australian-German or maybe Australian-UK co-production, with all the extra financing scaffolding that brings? I’ll leave that one open for now. A UK/Australian Copro makes sense.

I was explaining to a writer the other day like this is the risk I take as a producer with the stage of my career that I’m at I don’t get paid to develop the script with a writer. I’ll do my best to make sure the writer gets paid at least something and for now that means I will only develop projects that I can see where the audience might want to see it or has the actual potential to be made.

Do we have the capital investment in companies so they can spend money on options and developing scripts. I would hope this money comes from when you have a project that does well and the production company gets some money back – but how does that happen when you are just starting out?

We Interrupt this Broadcast podcast did a deep dive with David Court about Right Sizing your Screen Production Business that raises some of these questions.

I have to admit when I first listened to this I thought but that’s not the kind of company I want to run, and I felt as a film producer it makes way more sense for a distributor or a company making television to think about this – but as I’ve been exploring and thinking about how these films that I’m talking about in this world get made I can see the logic.

I’m guessing at a certain point as well this is why you employ a development person, someone who has the time to read the books and scripts - but what do you do when you want to be the development person that gets to read and discover the books? Did Lindsay Doran find this book, or was she recommended it by someone, or a development staffer she might have hired?

And actually, digging into Doran answered part of my own question about where the money comes from. Before she ran her own company she was president of United Artists (she steered two Bond films through there, among others), and Three Strange Angels has lived on studio overhead deals: a three-year first-look at MGM from 1999, then a two-year first-look at Radar in 2002.1 A first-look deal is a studio paying your running costs, the rent and the staff and the reading, in return for first crack at what you develop. That is exactly the capital I’m saying we don’t have here. The development engine wasn’t funded by taste alone. A studio underwrote it. We don’t have Studios in Australia that do this ‘underwriting’ and look what happens to Matchbox when NBC Universal decides to not continue supporting. I think there’s potentially a new model here that we could explore with Capital/Investment in production companies. I’m addding this on to a list of things we could do in Australia that I’ll come back to another time. This was something that was kind of on our WHAT IF list but not in this way.

Anyway – back to Sheep Detectives … so lets say you have managed to develop a really great script but we know from the story that this has sheep and is going to need quite a bit of Visual Effects. There’s some great videos that exist about how Babe got made – again I’d be thinking about that when thinking about how to make this film. VFX have come a long way since Babe (but it’s still quite amazing looking back at Babe what great work they did)2 .

And I think I finally worked out how Lord Miller got involved, which I’d been so curious about. Phil Lord and Chris Miller are executive producers, and the animation was actually done by Framestore. Lord and Miller bring is the instinct for making a comedy carried by animated characters land (the Lego Movie, Spider-Verse), plus a fresh relationship with Framestore from their own Project Hail Mary. And these two movies were probably made around the same time and both used puppetry. So I imagine that knowledge about puppetry was incredibly valuable to Lindsay.

But the real thread is more personal than any of that. In a YouTube short I found, the two of them call Doran their guru and spirit guide in the movie business. So they didn’t just come aboard for the sheep. They came aboard for her.

That feels like the big difference with how films are made in the US and UK vs. Australia. These projects get assembled through long relationships and overhead-funded companies that are working alongside each other. Did Three Strange Angels also lean on Working Title to access the UK side? It would be an obvious connection. Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner are both the only two other producers on this film. So it did look like a legit co-production partnership. I just can’t see what stage Working Title became involved in the film. More on that later.

We are going to need a bloody good writer, a great reliable director and a big star. I’d honestly try and find as many natural connections to Babe as I could, and if I’d been thinking about the film as an adaptation that’s what I’d have had in my head: make the movie that people are going to think about Babe. Doran clearly had the same instinct, because the Babe connection runs right through her. Back in 2002 she was developing a film for Chris Noonan, the director of Babe, to make. The lineage I keep reaching for isn’t a coincidence. It’s who she’s been working with for twenty years.

Most importantly – this film is championed by a producer that clearly has taste and a track record. And the track record is deep: she ran a studio, and she’s been circling exactly this kind of film for decades. In that same 2002 article she’s developing Nanny McPhee, adapted by and starring Emma Thompson, who is, of course, in Sheep Detectives too. These people have been making warm, big-cast family comedies together for twenty years. Taste is one of those intangible things that really you can’t teach. This is particularly a space I’m fascinated with as an early career producer, and I do think taste is about knowing audience – even if they aren’t big obvioius ones.

So could an Australian have directed this? I went in assuming we’d have nobody, and I was wrong.

The thing about why Kyle Balda was the right hire reframes the whole question. Performance-wise, this is an animated film wearing a live-action coat. The sheep are voiced and animated, and looking at some of the BTS videos (like this one for instance) are puppets first.

So the central directing job is the thing Balda had already done at the top level several times across the Minions films: directing voiced animal-comedy performance. Lindsay Doran didn’t gamble on an animator and hope they could manage live action. She hired the person whose core skill is the biggest component about this particular film.

That changes the Australian question. It’s not “could an animator handle live action.” It’s “who here has directed animated character comedy at feature scale, more than once, well enough that a producer would trust them with it.” Animation isn’t my field, so I went looking expecting to come up empty.

I didn’t.

Alexs Stadermann has walked almost exactly Balda’s road. Years inside the big studios (Disney in Sydney, a stretch at Aardman, story work at Animal Logic), then a run of feature comedies at Flying Bark: the two Maya the Bee films, Blinky Bill, then 100% Wolf and 200% Wolf, whose box office climbed from $9.8 million to $14.6 million. Two of those are literally animal comedies. If you sketched Balda’s career on paper and asked who in Australia matches it, you’d draw Stadermann.

Tania Vincent is the one I’d point to as actively mid-crossover right now. She co-directed the AACTA-nominated Scarygirl, then wrote and directed The Sloth Lane for Universal, the first woman in Australia to write and direct an animated feature, and won Best Direction in Animation at the Australian Directors Guild for it. The real tell is the next step: she was selected for Ron Howard’s Imagine Impact initiative, and the live-action family screenplay she wrote with her partner, The Keepers, sold to Netflix US. She’s earlier in her career than Stadermann, but she’s the clearest live example of an animation director already maybe stepping toward live-action family.

So here’s where it lands, and it’s the empowering part. The talent exists. What doesn’t is the same level of runs on the board and the commission. Balda earned his shot across a run of Illumination hits. We don’t make enough family-animation features at those budgets for anyone here to rack up the equivalent, and even when someone gets close, nobody hands them a film at this budget without flinching. The missing rung isn’t the director. It’s the trust, and the volume of work that builds it.

Which leaves me with a real question, not a rhetorical one, and I’d love the comments to do what I can’t. The talent clearly exists. So would the market actually back one of them at this scale? And who am I missing? I’m out of my depth in animation and I know some of you live in it. Tell us the names we should know.

This one starts with an advantage we hardly ever get: the lead is ours. Hugh Jackman is about as bankable as Australian actors come, and on a film like this he’s the name on the poster. So the single most expensive, most leverage-giving piece of casting is already a problem we’ve solved. That almost never happens.

The complication is everyone around him. A film like this is sold on a stacked cast, Emma Thompson, Nicholas Braun, and a whole flock of recognisable voices, and that wall of names is part of what lets it travel. Which runs into something specific about making a film here.

Bringing an overseas actor to work in Australia isn’t a simple booking. They have to be approved and visa-ed in through the Foreign Actor Certification Scheme, with MEAA providing a letter of opinion on each one, and the focus is squarely on protecting Australian actors: how many locals are cast, how much screen time and how many lines they get, whether the import is really necessary. There’s also an equal-billing rule, so an imported name has to be matched by equal billing for an Australian.

And then there’s the money, which is where the real teeth are. Under the MEAA Actors Feature Film Agreement, an all-Australian cast is “Category A” and pays the standard rates at minimum plus any personal margins. The moment you bring in even one overseas actor the film becomes “Category B,” and the rates of pay for the whole cast (everyone except extras and stand-ins) go up 25% on top of, not includeing their personal margin. It isn’t flat, either. Every additional imported actor after the first adds another 12.5%. Two imported names is a 37.5% loading, three is 50%, and by the seventh you’re at a 100% loading on the cast’s agreement rates IF YOU CAN GET THEM APPROVED. So each overseas name you bring in doesn’t just cost their own fee, it lifts what you pay everyone.

There’s a wrinkle here that loops straight back to the German-book problem from earlier. If you solved the foreign-IP question by making this an official co-production, the Australian-German or Australian-UK route I wondered about, the cast loading gets heavier, not lighter. A bona fide co-production is “Category C,” which starts at 75% rather than 25%. It does let you bring in more imported names before the rate tapers, but the floor is three times higher. The structure that fixes the IP problem makes the cast problem worse. The system pulls against itself.

And a film at this budget triggers one more layer, regardless of who’s in it. The agreement says any film budgeted over $22.5 million, or funded by a US major or mini-major, has to negotiate improved residuals individually with MEAA. So this was never going to be a film that quietly slots into the standard schedule. It’s exactly the kind of production the agreement singles out to sit down and negotiate.

The effect is that you can’t simply stack an Australian production with imported stars the way a US or UK film can. Well you could if you could fill it with every Australian name that is known internationally. Every additional overseas name adds cost and friction, by design. And the design works: this is the kind of protection that helped build the talent pool that gave the world Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Toni Collette and Russell Crowe in the first place. It’s doing exactly what it’s meant to.

But it does mean the international star-packaging these films are sold on is harder to assemble here. The same rule that protects our actors also caps the kind of cast that sells a hundred-million-dollar family comedy to the world.

There’s one escape hatch worth noting, and it’s specific to this film. The sheep are voiced, and voice work doesn’t need anyone to fly anywhere. The international ensemble could record from Los Angeles or London without ever triggering an Australian visa. I don’t know and didn’t have time to check if the loading applies to the Voice over work. Which actually points at how you’d do it here: Jackman leads, you fill the live-action roles with Australians that have some international credibilty (no shortage there and there are some great people out there that some forget are actually Australia), and the famous voices phone in from wherever they are. Or not -maybe you don’t even need as many internationally well known names. That’s a genuinely makeable version. It’s just a more Australian-faced film than the one that got made, and whether that changes how it sells is the open question.

So my imaginary Australian cast for this project - my only cavet being in Australia this would likely end up being a very “white” film if you needed internationally known names in these roles. I’ve based these suggestions of the actual cast in the film - trying to find the equivilants here as much as I can off the top of my head quickly.

George Hardy (the main man shepard) - Hugh Jackman

Caleb Merrow (the next door neighbour sheepherd who needs to be “handsome and very well dressed”) - Patrick Brammel, Aaron Pederson might be older but I reckon could still work. Or Mark Coles Smith?

Ham Gilyard (the butcher) - This would have been Bill Hunter back in the day. Richard Roxburgh today?

Beth Pennock (the innkeeper) - Yael Stone

Officer Tim Derry (the bumbling Police officer) - Bowen Yang (Did you know he’s Australian?)

Reverend Hillcoate (the priest with a secret connection to George) - This could be anyone. He didn’t have a huge role in the film.

Elliot Matthews (the newbie reporter) - Brenton Thwaites / Dacre Montgomery

Rebecca Hampstead (the visiting american) - Samara Weaving /Angourie Rice

Lydia Harbottle (the lawyer) - Toni Collette/Rose Byrne

A film like this costs what it costs because of the sheep, and the sheep are voiced and animated, so any conversation about whether we could afford it is a conversation about the visual effects. Which is where it gets interesting, because we have thirty years of receipts.

Babe cost an estimated USD $30 million in 1995. Run that through inflation and it’s about AUD $90 million in today’s money. It grossed $254 million worldwide and was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, winning the one for Visual Effects. Made by Kennedy Miller, in a paddock at Robertson, with John Cox’s animatronics and digital mouths stitched on top.

Then the sequel. Babe: Pig in the City, 1998, this time directed by George Miller himself, who had co-written and produced the original. It cost USD $90 million, roughly AUD $250 million today, and grossed $69 million. Same franchise, same guiding hand, three times the budget, about a quarter of the box office.

Sit those next to The Sheep Detectives, at USD $75 million, or about AUD $106 million. It has made something like AUD $146 million worldwide so far, so it worked.

Look at where that puts our film. In today’s dollars the original Babe sits at about AUD $90 million and the sequel at about AUD $250 million. The Sheep Detectives, at roughly AUD $106 million, is sitting right next to the original and nowhere near the sequel. So when I say this is a makeable scale, I’m not wishing. I’m saying it’s original-Babe scale. The scale that worked, not the scale that sank.

And the same franchise sinking when it tripled its budget is the cleanest evidence I have ever seen for something I bang on about: the money is not the thing. Same world, same Miller steering it, three times the spend, and audiences turned up in far smaller numbers. Mike Baard says audiences don’t care whether a film cost one million or fifty. Pig in the City is that sentence with a price tag attached.

The craft, by the way, was never the question. We won the Visual Effects Oscar for making a pig talk in 1995. We won Best Animated Feature for Happy Feet. And Peter Rabbit, that talking-rabbit hit, wasn’t just farmed out to an Australian animation house, it was built here: every visual effects company on the film was Australian, Animal Logic did the animation and the digital intermediate, it shot on a Sydney soundstage, and even the sound was finished here. We are extremely good at the exact thing this film needs.

So here’s where it lands, and it surprised me. The budget isn’t the wall I assumed. We have climbed it, at this scale, and won an Oscar doing it. What the sequel shows is that the danger isn’t reaching the number, it’s the volatility once you are there, more risk than any Australian financier could carry alone.

And this is the part worth slowing down for. Babe was a Kennedy Miller film. An Australian company originated it, made it, steered it, and would have negotiated a position in the waterfall, fees and a share of the profits, so they kept earning from it. But earning from a film and owning it are different things. The copyright sits with Universal, and copyright is the asset: the right to license it, sequel it, put it on a streamer, decide what happens to it in thirty years. As far as I know Kennedy Miller Mitchell has a stake in the income. Universal owns the film. We made it. They control it. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing as I originally thought it was.

Which sets the real question for the next rung. Not whether an Australian company can make a film at this scale, because Kennedy Miller Mitchell settled that thirty years ago, but whether one could do it today and still hold the copyright at the end.

We can develop it, transpose it, crew it, and afford it. The last question is who backs it, and what they take in return.

Start with what “backing” even means, because two very different things wear the word. There’s the distributor who releases your film, and there’s the money that pays to make it. Mike Baard, who runs Universal here is blunt that for a producer, the local distribution deal is only one piece of the financing puzzle3, and that most films at any scale only make sense with global recoupment in mind. His point lands harder for us than for anyone, because Australian films are in English, so we don’t compete in a protected local-language market the way a French or Korean film does. We go straight up against the full scale and marketing power of the US and UK, at home and everywhere else. So Universal Australia opening screens for a film is not the same as Universal funding one. The local office can give you a release. It cannot write a nine-figure cheque. That money comes from somewhere bigger, and somewhere bigger is somewhere else.

We already know what that looks like, because we have done it, recently, and beautifully. Look properly at Peter Rabbit. That talking-rabbit hit wasn’t farmed out to us for a few shots. It was built here. Every visual effects company on the film was Australian. Animal Logic did the animation and the digital intermediate, with Rising Sun, Cutting Edge, Cumulus and others alongside. It shot on a Sydney soundstage. The sound was finished here. And Screen Australia and Screen New South Wales are both credited, which is how public money shows up in a film’s credits. So Australians helped pay for it, did the animation, the visual effects, the sound and the shoot, and the copyright is held by Columbia and a US financing company. Public money in. Foreign copyright out. We didn’t just make a film we don’t own. We helped fund a film we don’t own.

So the real question of this whole series, the one sitting on top of the ladder, isn’t “could we make The Sheep Detectives.” Kennedy Miller Mitchell answered that with Babe thirty years ago. It’s “could we make it and still own it.” And there I think there are only two models worth looking at, and both come with an asterisk.

To answer this I want to go back to that article I couldn’t help but comment on earlier this year.

The first is the See-Saw model. Baard, asked who he admires most, named See-Saw Films, the company behind The King’s Speech, Lion and Top of the Lake, and called them truly Australian in identity but global in audience connection. That’s the dream version: an Australian company that originates and leads films the world watches, and holds onto them, by thinking global from inception rather than hoping a local film travels. The asterisk isn’t money, they could raise and run a budget this size blindfolded. It’s taste. See-Saw is a prestige house, and a talking-sheep family comedy sits outside that identity, not outside their capacity. So they prove an Australian company can lead and own a global film. They don’t prove anyone here is doing it in the commercial, wide-appeal register this film lives in. The company that cracked global ownership operates squarely inside the narrow band of films we already make.

So it really feels like the only production company that could pull this off in the country right now is Kennedy Miller Mitchell. I do wonder in the process of making this film did Lindsay Doran look at Australia (see what tax rebates we could get and our history) approach KMM and they said no so she went to Working Title who she already has a relationship with - or were KMM never in the picture?

The second is unfolding right now, and it’s the closest thing to a live experiment we have. The Bluey movie. Made by Ludo Studio in Brisbane, written and directed by creator Joe Brumm, in cinemas worldwide in August 2027. Created here, beloved everywhere. BBC Studios is financing and licensing it, and Disney is handling its global theatrical release, so the money and the global rights run partly offshore. But Bluey looks like the model that might actually work, because everything I’m reading about the ABC, Ludo and the merchandising rights suggests they, Ludo, have been careful and clever about holding onto ownership rather than handing the asset away for scale. And Bluey built a worldwide audience first, then let the money follow, which is exactly the route a Sheep Detectives never had. If Ludo walks up to the studio door as the owner and stays the owner, that is the template the rest of us should be studying.

Which is where it lands, and it’s not where I expected when I started. Making The Sheep Detectives was never the wall. We have the makers, the craft, and a budget we have matched before. The wall is inital capital for the producer and the actual producers in this country that are developing and making these kind of films.

And I forgot to stay and look at the copyright credit at the end of the film. So I don’t know what it is on The actual Sheep Detectives movie. It may be an Amazon MGM owned film, distributed in Australia by Sony.

And it’s a better question than “why don’t we make films like this,” because it has an answer you can build toward instead of just mourn. What would an Australian company need, in capital and in policy, to walk up to that studio door as the owner rather than the supplier? I am really curious to explore this whole problem over this series and would really love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Till I see you at the cinema next, Kate.