Bluey deal FOMO will kill the next Bluey - by Joe Hicks

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Bluey deal FOMO will kill the next Bluey<br>Do we want dreams or dollarbucks?

Joe Hicks<br>May 28, 2026

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Credit: Ludo Studio<br>The ABC just made the biggest show on earth and now we want to use its success to change how it does things.<br>Let’s slow down a sec before we break something important that belongs to our kids. Starting with Bluey’s commissioning deal.<br>Deals

Bluey cost about $6 million to make. I don’t have a copy of the deal documents, but here’s everything I’ve learnt about how it came together.<br>The ABC put in around $1.4 million, the BBC around $1.8 million. Government funding and a bit of money from Ludo, the studio behind the show, covered the rest. Screen Australia, the government’s screen funding body, invested $500,000. Screen Queensland’s contribution was never disclosed, but up to $250,000 it would have been a straight grant with no copyright stake. The PDV Offset, a 30% government rebate on post-production and digital work done in Australia, would have contributed roughly $1.5 million. It gets refunded after production wraps, so Fulcrum Finance, another name in the show’s credits, fronted it during production. Ludo picked up what was left, possibly around half a million dollars.<br>For Aussie kids’ shows, the ABC usually puts in just enough to unlock Screen Australia funding, around $115,000 per half hour. They found an international partner who could plug the rest, like all our kids’ shows do. This one let it stay as Australian as it is, which normally doesn’t happen without trimming things back for overseas. The ABC got an Australiamaxxing preschool show in front of Aussie kids. Nice.<br>The BBC got the rights to show Bluey almost everywhere else and make money off it. Ludo kept the majority of the IP. The ABC and Screen Australia structured the deal to make sure of that. It wasn’t an unusual arrangement for either side. But in Bluey’s particular case, Ludo holding the IP put the BBC at the mercy of an unproven creator who wanted to make the most Australian, thinky show ever made for four-year-olds, the kind who might even tank a deal with Disney to keep Aussie voices in the show. As I’ve written before, how many people want to back a “preschool show about ordinary family life and play, set in Brisbane with Aussie accents and slang, with two female leads and the occasional episode revolving around parents, headed up by a bloke known for some YouTube animations, who had to teach himself how to write a script after he got funding, was somehow trying to win over 4- and 40-year-olds at once, demanded new scores for every episode, insisted everything stay under one roof in an animation studio that didn’t exist, when pretty much anywhere else in the world could have animated it for less, and refused to budge on any of it?”<br>No preschool show that wore its country as hard as Bluey had ever become a global franchise, let alone one trying to pull off all the other stuff. Ludo had shopped it around as a one-minute pilot for a year and no one wanted it. Getting it into different markets and building a merchandise business would cost a fortune before a cent came back. They didn’t even know if Australian kids would like it. The ABC was also precious about keeping its shows to itself in Australia. Whatever audience Bluey built at home couldn’t seed an audience on YouTube, where any kids’ franchise has to be these days. Geo-restricting a whole country doesn’t do you any favours with the algorithm.<br>The BBC’s bet paid off spectacularly. Like any Australian with feelings and a fondness for money, I feel that sting. Australian taxpayers covered around two-thirds of what it cost to make the show. It’s not like we get nothing. Ludo owns the IP and gets its cut of everything Bluey earns, as that little © Ludo Studio on every piece of merch will tell you. Joe Brumm, the show’s creator, got an undisclosed share of the show’s revenue too. Moose Toys rinses the toys, there’s Bluey’s World, and production crews who’d otherwise have to leave the state or the country are getting work in Queensland. People holiday here to stand where Bluey and Bingo stood, and Aussies are growing up knowing the biggest show in the world came from down the road.<br>At the end of the day, there’s still potentially $300 million a year going to the BBC, based on the ABC’s calcs. A chunk of that could have stayed here under a different deal. Describing the deal as so obviously bad ignores what was actually on the table in 2016 though. It’s tough to argue anyone got the short end of the stick at the time, even when you chuck in all the Australian government funding that came with it. People weren’t lining up to take the BBC’s place in 2016 like they are in 2026. You can regret selling NVIDIA at a dollar back then too, but it was a fair deal at the time and you don’t deserve to be called an idiot because it paid off for those who held.<br>The ABC could have tried to...