Report: After a Bumpy Netflix Run, Ryan Murphy Is Departing for Disney

In an industry as young as streaming, the good old days seem like yesterday. Just five years ago, Netflix handed Ryan Murphy a deal reportedly worth something like $300 million to leave his longtime home at Fox. On the heels of a similarly eye-popping Shonda Rhimes deal, the high-flying disrupter offered the so-called enfant terrible of television near carte blanche to make the kinds of shows—American Horror Story, Nip/Tuck—that had worked so well for FX. But now, after the creator of Dahmer-Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, seems to have finally found his groove, Bloomberg is reporting that he plans to move his business to Disney to reunite with the former Fox executives who presided over his biggest hits.

It’s not a shocking move given that Murphy has continued to produce shows for Disney Entertainment co-chairman Dana Walden—a close personal friend and godmother to his two children—and FX chairman John Landgraf, who both moved to Disney after it acquired most of the Fox assets in 2019. Back in 2018, Murphy told The Hollywood Reporter that Fox simply couldn’t match Netflix’s offer. “Looking back, I honestly feel that had they come in with a number that had been [closer to his expectations]…I would’ve gone there,” he said. Fox denied Murphy’s version of events at the time. Disney and Netflix declined to comment for this story. A representative for Murphy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Murphy’s first three series for Netflix—The Politician, Hollywood, and Ratched—failed to ignite the zeitgeist. That seemed even more glaring after Rhimes’s first show for the streamer, Bridgerton, was an instant smash. Bloomberg reports that Murphy has been negotiating a new deal with Disney over the past year, even as he found success at Netflix. Last fall, Dahmer surged to the top of the streamer’s most-watched series list. It’s currently the third most popular English-language series of all time for Netflix—another recent Murphy show, The Watcher, holds the No. 10 spot—and is expected to do well at the Emmys. Outside of nods for documentary and music supervision, Murphy has not received any nominations from the Television Academy for his Netflix output. In the same timeframe, he’s still earned major Emmy recognition for his FX series, American Crime Story and Pose.

In terms of optics, it’s not ideal for Netflix to lose one of its most prolific creatives to rival Disney, but the streamer won’t be out of the Murphy business entirely. He’s expected to continue working on the shows that he developed for Netflix, only now the streamer won’t have to give him such a heady deal. (Monster will return with a second season focused on the Ménendez brothers, and The Watcher has been renewed.) The market has cooled considerably on high-priced talent deals in recent years as streaming has struggled.

Murphy’s proven track record at Fox should give Disney confidence that tying him down to a new deal will pay off even as the company looks to cut billions of dollars in costs and, like the rest of Hollywood, remains at a production standstill due to the ongoing writers strike. Bloomberg cites unnamed sources in reporting that the bulk of the potential Disney/Murphy deal was worked out prior to the WGA strike’s launch in May, and that nothing has been finalized as of yet. As studios continue to grapple with rapidly changing economics in the industry—and in some cases abruptly alter their development plans—the landscape in Hollywood remains cloudy.