Netflix is adding a Russell Brand documentary to its slate after the comedian was sentenced to 10 years in prison for rape and sexual assault. The project, Russell Brand: Open Secret, will span Brand’s comedy career, the newspaper investigation that exposed him, and the criminal trial that ended his public life.
72 Films, the Fremantle company behind Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, is producing. Olivia Isaacs is directing. The film draws on archive footage and inside voices, including reporting by The Times and The Sunday Times journalists Rosamund Urwin and Charlotte Wace.
The project’s stated focus is less about re-prosecuting Brand than about the system around him: how, despite many people in the TV industry being aware of his behaviour, he evaded punishment for so long.
What the record shows
- Sentenced on Monday to 10 years and six months; he is expected to serve around seven years before release on licence.
- Convicted of a violent anal rape at his Hampstead home in 2009 and three sexual assaults.
- Transferred to HMP Wandsworth after sentencing.
- Justice Bennathan said Brand operated with “staggering arrogance” and said his entourage often “indulged” his “dreadful behavior.”
Why this is a streaming business story
For Netflix, the title sits inside a familiar event-driven true-crime playbook. The Jimmy Savile lineage signals the format: archive-led, testimony-heavy, built around a public figure whose impunity is the actual subject. The commercial difference here is adjacency risk. A documentary tied to a convicted sex offender can attract a large curiosity audience, but media buyers will have to weigh that reach against the message environment.
The calculation for marketers
The takeaway is not “avoid all crime content.” It is that event-driven documentaries monetise at different speeds. A title like this can generate earned media before launch, but sustained advertiser demand will depend on how Netflix positions the film: as a news-driven examination of institutional failure rather than a celebration of the offender.
No release date was included in the announcement.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
