Over the past decade there’s been a surge in documentaries and docuseries about celebrities. As a recent article on IndieWire points out, documentaries about Celine Dion, Simon Biles, Steve Martin, Elton John, Pharrell Williams and Brian Eno have been released just in 2024.
For producers looking to feed the beast that is the celebrity documentary genre, the question isn’t so much who’s next, but rather who’s left? For serious documentary audiences, it’s a question of whether the frantic production of celebrity-focused fare may lead to more serious films in the burgeoning genre.
A report by Parrot Analytics showed there was a 373% increase in the number of biographical documentaries on streaming services from 2020 to 2024. As streamers fight for audiences and see the large appetite that viewers have for the genre, the race to find anyone who hasn’t yet been considered worthy of the documentary treatment is heating up across all genres — from comedy to music, sports and the solidly dependable arena of true-crime, which seems to offer an endless pool of potential blockbusting content.
As one production exec told IndieWire, the problem is that “at some point you’re going to run out of GOATs [greatest of all times] to tell stories about”. That may be true but it isn’t stopping streaming giants from luring new subjects with the promise of multimillion-dollar payouts for their troubles.
David and Victoria Beckham were reportedly paid $20m for their participation in their Netflix docuseries. Beckham giving interviews about how awful and uncomfortable the experience was hasn’t stopped the celebrity superstar couple from signing up for a new series that will focus its attention on Victoria.
The added incentive of signing up the Beckhams as executive producers of their own biographical series only makes the carrot sweeter, and it’s a strategy that streamers have used to get the subjects of these shows fully on board with such projects.
Basketball legend Michael Jordan served as executive producer of The Last Dance, the epic 10-part series released on Netflix in 2020, which told the story of his career and his golden era as the star of the legendary 1990s Chicago Bulls team. The show won Emmys, enjoyed huge popular and critical acclaim, became the most watched ESPN documentary and survived the criticism of some of Jordan’s teammates to set the stage for a host of similar sweeping US sports documentaries and series that have since become a staple of the streaming world.
While the executive producer credit may serve as a potentially lucrative incentive for the involvement of living subjects of biographical documentary content, things can become a little trickier when it comes to shows made about celebrities who are no longer with us.
The recent six-part, nine-hour docuseries about music legend Prince, created by OJ Made in America director Ezra Edelman and apparently four years in the making was originally touted as Netflix’s next major documentary triumph. The film has been screened to some industry executives, but issues about its length and some of the less-than-flattering information it contains about its subject seem to have hobbled its ability to move from much-anticipated whisper to actual release. It has been reported that the Prince estate is unhappy with what they’ve seen and has threatened to not grant music rights to the film.
What seems certain at the moment is that whether alive or dead, anyone with a big enough cultural profile is certain to have an eager documentary filmmaker knocking at their door. With social media and online presence having become such a large and ordinary part of the modern celebrity brand, streamers are keen to piggyback the multimillion figure audience that stars enjoy as a way to ensure large viewing numbers.
The danger of such an approach is that the shows made to convert fan base numbers into viewing figures may end up looking perilously close to long, flashy adverts for their subjects rather than objectively well considered documentary films. Though that’s a risk that streamers seem more than willing to take as the battle for audience share and engagement consumes their production strategies.
Whether there’s a possible spin-off benefit to serious documentaries as a result of the appetite for celebrity-focused content among mainstream audiences is also uncertain. It does not mean that critically acclaimed festival buzz favourites like Senegalese-French director Mati Diop’s Dahomey — focusing attention on the issue of African artefacts seized by colonial powers — or Haitian director Raoul Peck’s Cannes-winning documentary about SA photographer Ernest Cole will be coming to a streaming platform near you soon.
What it might mean is that among the documentary films and series about sports icons, rock gods and serial killers, one or two truly new and enlightening documentary films may have a chance of expanding their markets beyond the narrow audience of festivals.
So if you’re a serious documentary fan, it’s not quite time to give up hope just yet.
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