TRIO TO CHAMPION BOLD STORYTELLERS AND VISIONARY TALENT—PRODUCING GLOBAL CONTENT ACROSS MULTIPLE PLATFORMS

Elisabeth Murdoch, Stacey Snider, and Jane Featherstone officially announced Sister, a global production and development company focused on championing bold storytellers and visionary talent. Sister is built upon the foundation of Featherstone’s Emmy Award winning scripted indie, Sister Pictures, and sees all three co-founders and co-owners combine their collective expertise, track records, and a shared commitment to creating break out, genre-defining narrative content. Sister will have offices in Los Angeles and London, with corporate HQ in the UK.

Elisabeth Murdoch serves as Sister’s Executive Chairman, Jane Featherstone, founder of Sister Pictures (Chernobyl, Broadchurch) becomes Head of Sister London, and Stacey Snider, former 20th Century Fox Film Chairman, is Global CEO and Head of Sister LA.

Immediately at launch, the trio are thrilled that Sister London will fully incorporate the existing teams behind Sister Pictures highly successful programme slate who will continue to operate as normal. They include Executive Producers Naomi de Pear (The Power, Don’t Forget the Driver, Flowers), Chris Fry (Chernobyl, Giri/Haji), and producer Katie Carpenter (The Bisexual, Flowers). Dan Isaacs, current COO of Sister Pictures, becomes COO of Sister London.

Elisabeth Murdoch, Stacey Snider and Jane Featherstone say:
“When the three of us began to talk about ideas for a new kind of company, there was an immediate recognition that we could combine our collective experiences in film and television and build something exceptional and fiercely independent. We have each learned our craft over many years and now care most about the quality of work we produce—it's integrity, its purpose, and our ability to clear the way for singular talent who have something to say. The ever-changing entertainment landscape brings with it complexity, and success here requires experience, deep rooted relationships, creative intuition, and vision. We are fortunate to be well capitalised, to have the independence and confidence to write our own rules, to be bold and bespoke in the choices we make, and to utilise our resources to champion visionary story-tellers. And to those story-tellers we say—come and be brave, come and be rebellious, come and do your best work.”

The combination of Featherstone and her highly regarded team’s track-record, Snider’s renowned creative skills, deep industry expertise and relationships, and Murdoch’s proven success building and scaling talent-driven content enterprises uniquely positions Sister in the global marketplace as a resource for talent and creators. Sister welcomes and cultivates distinct voices with a unique world view. Its aim is to provide those voices with multiple platforms from which to tell stories that are both commercially viable and critically-acclaimed, to audiences around the world.

Sister Pictures currently has 26 staff in London. In 2019, it produced 25 hours of scripted television per year, which will rise to 32 hours per year in 2020.

NOTES TO THE EDITOR

Elisabeth Murdoch

Elisabeth Murdoch has a proven track record of founding and scaling world class creative businesses. She became a media entrepreneur in 1994 when she founded EP Communications, owning and operating two dominant Californian NBC affiliate stations winning the 1995 Peabody Award for Broadcast Excellence. Selling the stations to Smith Broadcasting, she then moved to the UK where she became the Managing Director of Sky Networks.

Elisabeth Murdoch founded Shine Group in 2001 and was its Chairman until 2014. Shine Group grew to become a leading global television production and distribution company and is best known for creating multi-award winning global hit series such as Masterchef, The Bridge, Broadchurch, and Spooks. The company was sold to 21st Century Fox in 2011.

In 2014, Elisabeth co-founded Locksmith Animation, the UK’s only dedicated high-end feature animation studio, where she is Executive Chair. In 2015, she founded Vertical Networks, the world’s leading mobile first content studio, in partnership with Snap. Vertical created the hugely successful show PhoneSwap and the most popular daily Snapchat Discover channel, Brother, which boasts 21 million monthly subscribers.

Elisabeth has continued to back world class creative entrepreneurs throughout her career. She is a strategic minority shareholder in both iand 110% Content both in the UK.

Elisabeth established the Freelands Foundation (US and UK registered charity) in 2014 for the advancement of the arts and education. She was a Tate Trustee for 2009 to 2016 and was appointed to the National Council of the Arts Council of England in 2018.

Stacey Snider

Stacey Snider served as Chairman and CEO of Twentieth Century Fox from June 2017 until its acquisition by Disney in April 2019. Before that, she served as the Co-Chairman/CEO of DreamWorks, and from 1999 to 2006, she was Chairman of Universal Pictures.

During her tenure at Fox, Snider authorized recent films including Bohemian Rhapsody, Logan, and The Greatest Showman, and helped initiate global franchises such as The Fast and the Furious and The Bourne Identity series. Snider’s long-time collaboration with Steven Spielberg generated a host of multi-award winning titles including The Post, Munich, and Lincoln, the most recent being the much-anticipated West Side Story.

Jane Featherstone

As the former chief executive of Kudos and co-chairman of Shine UK, Jane oversaw the production of some of the UK’s most ground-breaking and best-loved dramas. From BAFTA-winning television series Broadchurch, Humans, Life on Mars, and Flowers, through to Hustle, Spooks, The Hourand River, Featherstone’s pioneering vision brought quality drama to the mainstream whilst growing Kudos into one of the UK’s most recognisable and formidable indies.

Departing Kudos in 2014, Jane then founded Sister Pictures (in which Murdoch became a minority shareholder) in November 2015 as an independent television production company specialising in authored, bold and distinctive stories for UK and international audiences. The indie has in four years grown to be one of the leading, international drama producers. The recent world-wide phenomenon and winner of 10 Emmy Awards including Outstanding Limited Series, Chernobyl (HBO/ Sky Atlantic), adds to the critical and audience acclaim the company has achieved for its work, which includes The Split (BBC One/Sundance AMC) Cleaning Up (ITV), Flowers S2 (Channel 4), and Don’t Forget the Driver (BBC Two).

Murdoch and Featherstone have collaborated before when Shine acquired Kudos Productions in 2007. Featherstone went on to become Shine TV Chairman in addition to her role as CEO of Kudos, before departing to form Sister Pictures in 2015.

About SISTER

Sister, formed on September 30th, 2019, by Elisabeth Murdoch, Stacey Snider, and Jane Featherstone, is a global production and development company. The storytelling triumvirate share a mutual ambition to build a modern, international company that champions exceptional, visionary talent. Sister will harness its co-founders’ collective expertise in film and television, their track records, and a shared commitment to creating break out narrative content for multiple platforms.

Forthcoming titles include, series two of Emmy Award winning writer Abi Morgan’s The Split (BBC One/Sundance AMC), Cleaning Up (ITV), Flowers S2 (Channel 4), and Don’t Forget the Driver (BBC Two or BBC One), Giri/Haji (BBC Two/Netflix), the adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s literary phenomenon The Power (Amazon), and Adam Kay’s adaptation of his international best-seller This Is Going To Hurt (BBC).