Fifth Season Acquires Producer Story Collective; Co-Founders Simon Vaughan and Helen Jackson Step Down
Fifth Season has acquired The Story Collective in a significant move to enhance its production capabilities in the UK.
The acquisition follows Fifth Season’s minority investment in The Story Collective at its inception in 2021, shifting now to a full acquisition this week.
As part of the transition, co-founder Simon Vaughan will depart to establish a new studio, while Helen Jackson will step down. Damian Keogh, another co-founder, will remain with the company and has been appointed Fifth Season’s Senior Vice President and Managing Director of International Scripted. A new senior leadership team, which includes Elouise West and Natasha Neill from The Story Collective and Charlotte Bloxham from Fifth Season, will work together on business affairs, finance, and production from Fifth Season’s London office. Ben Irving will continue to lead Fifth Season’s development and production slate in the UK as Senior Vice President and Creative Director, focusing on expanding the studio’s UK and international production activities.
The Story Collective is known for producing Steven Knight’s Disney+ boxing drama, A Thousand Blows, now in its second season. The company also maintains creative partnerships with Tom Davis and James de Frond’s Mighty Pebble Pictures and Ben Donald’s Cosmopolitan Pictures.
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Vaughan will launch a new venture called Storyworks, which has secured a first-look agreement with Fifth Season and will collaborate with The Story Collective on existing projects. Storyworks aims to “build high profile scripted productions from LA and London,” according to Fifth Season.
Graham Taylor, CEO of Fifth Season, remarked, “The Story Collective was built by Damian, Simon, and Helen 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 UK studio. Fifth Season’s offering now has even greater firepower, and an undeniable nexus of talent connections and projects to put our weight behind.”
Keogh described the acquisition as an “exciting and natural next step,” while Vaughan noted that it would “help deliver the scaled enterprise we all set out to build together.”
