Nearly 16 months after Jordan Peele’s Get Out lit the film world on fire, the dust has settled somewhat, allowing the celebrated multi-hyphenate to take a deep breath and decide what comes next.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Peele’s next move is in the direction of Amazon Studios, where the former Key & Peele star has signed an exclusive first-look TV deal (not to be confused with the first-look feature deal he has with Universal Pictures). Technically speaking, he’s moving an existing deal — which he signed with Sonar Studios prior to the release of Get Out — inked via Monkeypaw Productions, his company which produced both Key & Peele and Get Out.
Peele already has a couple of projects lined up for production, including a documentary series based on the Lorena Bobbitt incident (if you don’t remember that, you can just research it on your own time) and a series titled The Hunt, which centers around a group of Nazi hunters in 1970s New York.
Given Amazon’s massive entertainment budget — see: The billion-dollar Lord of the Rings series in gestation — in addition to its recent internal reorganization, we wouldn’t be surprised to see every one of Peele’s proposals get green-lit, no matter how far off the beaten path. In a statement, he said “I couldn’t be more excited about this new relationship with Amazon. They’ve been a fantastic partner to Monkeypaw over the last year because they’re committed to the same kind of fun and culturally relevant television we are.”
Amazon’s decision to pluck Peele off the market is par for the course at this point, as content creators are in high demand. Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes and American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy — also behind Glee and Nip/Tuck — both recently signed huge exclusivity agreements with Netflix. Amazon’s stable of makers is equally impressive, currently including Jill Soloway (Transparent) and Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead), among others.
Next up for Peele is the release of BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee’s film about a black cop infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, on which Peele served as a producer. Peele also recently teased his next directorial credit, a horror/thriller film titled Us.
