Big Take‘Bluey’: A Blue Heeler Worth $2 Billion With an Uncertain Future
Bluey, the Australian animated TV show about a family of Blue Heeler dogs, is worth $2 billion. But is Bluey worth that without the show’s auteur Joe Brumm in the picture? The release of a special extended episode coming this weekend is sparking rumors about the smash-hit sensation.
On today’s Big Take podcast, Bloomberg’s Devin Leonard and Reyhan Harmanci join host David Gura to talk about the beloved program, the secret to its broad appeal, and the challenge of managing Bluey’s commercial success. Featuring some of our youngest listeners.
Further reading: How Bluey Became a $2 Billion Smash Hit—With an Uncertain Future
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Louis a family fand it is a dad, and Chili is the mom, and Bingo's the younger sister, Louie's oldest sister.
It's a little blue dog healer dog h ee ei okay, And they have like adventures around their house and there's like a problem and then they like solve it. Oh yeah, so they like snash philia.
The kids are talking about Blue. That is the hit Australian animated TV show that premiered in twenty eighteen. It has millions of fans worldwide, and those fans are children, yes, but also grown ups. There are Reddit threads about if it's okay for childless adults to watch it. The answer, by the way, is a resounding yes. There are too many fan blocks to count, and articles and pages of vocal adult fans on TikTok. Blue is a big business.
It's a behemoth. It was the number two most stream show in the US behind Suits Full Stop.
That's Rayhan Hermancy. She's a senior editor at Bloomberg Business Week.
I have two kids, four and six, and like over the past year, I couldn't help but notice they were coming home from school with Bluey mimeographed coloring pages. Every birthday party has some element of blue We have blue Cops in our house that I swear to God we didn't buy. So like it has permeated like young kids' lives in a really big way. So it felt like the financial and the scale of viewership was really extreme.
I contacted Brand Finance, was just a company that does evaluations for brands.
Devin Leonard is a senior writer on the global business team, and.
They said it's worth as much as two billion dollars, but they also said that potentially it keeps on going, it could be worth as much as pepper Pig, which was sold to has Bro. I think it was twenty nineteen for a four billion dollars.
In twenty twenty three, Americans watched seven hundred and thirty one million hours of blue That is more than Ncis Cray's Anatomy, Gilmore, Girls or Friends, and each episode of the show is only seven minutes long. Now, you could chalk up the success of Bluey to its popular appeal to lucrative distribution deals, but it is also because of its creator. It's Joe Brumm. He is the soul of the show.
He's his verice of earnest, kind of since a very funny guy. He just sort of imbused the show with all of that, and he wants everything to be perfect, you know, because he's kind of a perfectionist. It's his aesthetic and you know, reflection of his life.
This episode of The Big Take is called Bluey's Big Business.
How a kids show about a family of dogs became an international sensation And what's at stake for blue fans and its financial stakeholders as Joe Brum decides whether it's time to call it quits. What is it about the show that your kids like so much and that you like as well well?
So it really isn't about them. They are at best indifferent to Bluey. But I during the Pandemic, we start watching Blue and you know from the jump it is like visually delightful and has a kind of it's like operating on a bunch of levels at once. I think that one of the things that makes it so appealing is that Bandit and Chili's daughter is Blue and Bingo. They're not gendered in the way that like a lot of children's entertainment is gender to like kind of pink unicorns and like Marvel Action figures, they play across a lot of different sphirits and they're very physical, and I think that it makes it really easy to watch and not really think about, like if you're a boy watching Blue, Like I'm watching a girls show, which I think can be a big deal for kids, and you know, it's like sweet and related in the kind of kids plot. And then the parents in it are pretty remarkable. They're just built for this age of parenting. I think they immediately start doing imagine or play with the kids, especially bandit. The dad and I bought this statue today from a shop and it turned out to be magic. Yeah. And it's both aspirational and also very real. The parents get frustrated, the kids get frustrated, and I think that that representation is very interesting and also feels of its time.
There are a lot of episodes we could pull from here. I wonder what your favorite one is.
Well, I have like a sentimental favorite, because you know, there's a whole lot that I really like. But there's an episode called the Beach in season one. The Healers go to the beach and then Chili, you know Blue's mom, She wants to go to take a walk by herself, and I don't know it just it might be my wife just wanting to get feet away from the rest of us. But to me, it's sort of said the show, you know, it was about a little more than's just the kids.
It struck me watching the beach, how much compressed wonder. There isn't a lot of these episodes. I mean, yes, they're seven minutes long. They never drag, and it seems like there's a lot in there.
Oh yeah, I mean there's a lot of moments where they very true to life, pivot quickly from like boredom and anger to wonder. It really captures, I think, the feeling of a parent, just like trying to grapple with all of these big feelings and also the banality of it all.
Do you have a favorite?
Yeah, I mean, well, sleepy Time. I feel like I'm going to get emotional talking about sleepy Dinner.
I want to do a big ghost late to night.
I'll wake up in my own bank.
Sleepy Time is the episode where Bingo, the younger sister, starts having trouble falling asleep.
You do your best, Toney, but remember I'm always here. If you need me.
Okay, weet drains you. Now.
From Chili's perspective, it's just kind of like, oh God, Like the kid keeps getting up and getting into my bed, and so you're there with them in this, and then it changes and becomes about the dreaming. In your dream, she sees her mother as the sun and she's orbiting around and she's like holding like a little stuffy and it's just like, I just think it captures how as a parent you don't even know what's going on in your kid's head, and so it's like both so big and so small. And what's amazing is that there's almost no steaks in this whole episode, and a lot of Bluey the steaks could not be lower. A lot of other animated shows use animation to just go to crazy places and like show extreme situations, and Bluey is very restrained. And how it.
Approaches that, like that wonderful interplay between that the kind of cosmic dream and then what's happening in the bed, which is like punching and kicking, and you see how she's processing it. But also the parents are kind of living through this as well.
So yeah, yeah, I mean I think that's why Sleepy Time has really stood out because it really just encapsates the whole experience.
And also to the music of Gustav Holtz the Planet.
Yes Yes, years before Joe Brum and his team weave the Planets by Gustav Holst into this ambitious and critically acclaimed episode Sleepy Time. Brum started Bluey with a clip capturing a simpler parenting scene.
He and another animator they do this little clip Bandit takes Bluey to the playground, you know. Bandit's playing Fruit and Ninch on his phone while he's pushing Bluie on the swing and then blue goes around the swing set and comes down and clung them on the head. And he shows it to these guys, the founders of Luda Studio, which is a sort of small sort of TV production operation in Brisbane, and they like it, but they but they shop it around and they're able to raise some money from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to do a five minute pilot.
Brum took that I let to a big gathering of TV executives and it was a hit. Soon the production company had a deal with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and BBC Studios and some Australian government agencies. BBC Studios now manages Bluey's licensing rights outside of Australia.
Last year, the BBC's revenues topped two billion pounds for the first time, and they're saying a lot of that had to do with the sale of Bluey consumer products.
It seems pretty clear that, you know, when the BBC says they want to double revenue by twenty twenty eight, a big chunk of that has to be in part due to Bluey.
And it goes beyond Bluey the show. There are Bluey themed books, live shows, toys, pajamas and in twenty nineteen, Disney won a bid to stream Bluey on Disney Plus.
Disney tested the show in American kids. They love the accents. And then along with that, as Joe put a Disney you know, put into gazumping offer that blew away all the other of the other contenders.
If we look at this as a pie, BBC's obviously gotten a lot out of this. I watched it on this Plus. How does that giant entertainment company fit into all of this? And how much of that pie are they are they getting?
I mean, We've been joking that Bluie ends up being kids' first lests and intellectual property because for American audiences it's a Disney show. Like when they go to Disney theme parks and they can't see Bluey like, they get upset. But Disney has benefited greatly from this show, and.
They're just licensing this. They're just licensing it.
They do take a piece of the merchandising, so they're not wholly cut out. But I do think it creates a little bit of friction when you have so many people who identify Blueye as like this generation's like iconic children's television, piece of intellectual property, and Disney can only license it. Disney cannot control the rights. They can't exploit them in the way that you would imagine that they would like to.
On top of that, the company is considered buying you know, blue out right several times. It's unclear why a deal has the Mae Lubis Studio controls Bluie. They say it's thought for sale a little though, you know, for the right price, you know, who knows. But I think the problem is what is it worth without Joe Brumm.
A question that's now front and Center. A surprise episode last weekend confirmed a fan theory that the Healer family is moving out of their house and maybe fans speculate off of TV. The creator has been coy on whether he'll stick with the show, and while it could technically continue without Joe Brum, would Blue be as valuable if he steps away? That's after the break Demn, could you tell us about Joe Brum, the mind behind Bluie? How did he come up with the idea for the show itself?
Well, it's sort of funny because he was an animator. He wasn't somebody who wrote TV. But he would listen to people talking on the writers' room doing kids shows, and the writers role older and they were trying to draw on experience, is trying to remember things that they've done with their kids. But in his case, it was all right there. You know, he's working for home, he's just two little girls, and everything's really really fresh. He's just having those experiences, so he basically draws on that for his scripts. It's all drawn, you know, right from his own life.
How much has the wild success of this changed both his life and the production company that latched onto this Early on.
We'll do the production company first. They went from like a five person operation to like a fifty or sixty person in operation. Blue has become the sort of global, multi platform enterprise for them. But I think for Joe it's a bit more complicated because he has said Bluie is going to end at some point. I have other projects. I want to do projects for, you know, older kids, and then his own daughters are older. But I also just get the sense that like he just keeps wanting to do shows that are better and better and better and aggregate, you know, to use his term. He doesn't want to repeat himself. He just seems like somebody who is it's a true creative person.
I mean, I feel strangely moved by the difficulty of managing success. He is really a guy living in Brisbane, Australia who happened to make something that ties together like ten major cultural threads at once golden age of television. It's in age where like tours, the tours are really the showrunners, the people who are writing and creating their own work. I think of a Jesse Armstrong like succession. You know, they don't want to be locked into their own success. And right now you have Joe Bram where he technically doesn't control the rights of Blue you have the fates of like BBC and to some degree, Disney. As Devin points out in the story, Disney's streaming has been a major money loser for the company. Bluie is a real bright spot. We can make some informed speculation that, like, if Joe Brom was like, I'm good for ten seasons, Disney would be like, bam, like we we want to be in the blue business, you know. But I think everyone seemingly understands the singularity of this guy's vision, Like what sells it is how personal it feels, and so just strategically, how are you going to scale such a personal thing?
Last weekend a surprise episode called Ghost Basket Drop. This is the one about the Healer family, moving ahead of a much longer episode everyone is waiting to see, called The Sign. It is four times as long as a usual episode, and it's sets premiere this Sunday, April fourteenth. So far, there's been no announcement about a fourth season, and unsurprisingly that has stirred up a lot of speculation about the show's future.
The Sign is interesting because it's coming out simultaneously in the US and other places, which is usually not the case. And I think that there's a lot of anticipation about what it is, obviously with the fans, but I think also for Joe Browm in his camp, it is the closest thing to a Bluey movie, which has also been long rumored to exist.
That latest episode seem to confirm a theory among blue fans that the Healers are selling their house, But does it signal an even bigger move that Bluey could be coming to an end.
The Little Guy said that specifically, you know, a lot of it depends on like what the response is, what happens after the sign So I kind of speculate towards towards the end that if he's going to go forward, he wants to know he can top that or you do something better, he says, you know, it's just a magical episode. It's an episode that sums up what we've been trying to do for three seas is now so so I think I just think he sets to the bar really, really high for himself, and that's why the show's so good.
We've talked about through the anxiety of fans how much nervousness is there on the commercial side of this in this vacuum period between season three and whatever might come next for the BBC Disney what's at stake here?
I mean, David, I don't know about if you know about the media industry, but we're not exactly in a good state right now in general. So I would imagine that if I were the BBC and I was attached to the biggest children's show in the world with one of the biggest merchandising horizons possible, I would be very anxious about that. Ending from Disney side. You know, Disney's a ginormous company as many and many things going on, but it's streaming service has been the source of a lot of issues.
You know, Disney Plus actually lost some subscribers in the last last quarter. But you can just imagine how many of those subscribers are subscribing primarily for Bluie. If if Blue's accounting for almost a third of the TV views on Disney Plus, that's a really important show for them. They can't afford to lose it. Unfortunately. You know, it may not be you know, it may be when their power to keep it going.
At this point, I feel anxiety about it continuing, and I feel anxiety about it ending. Yeah, I think it's really again, like there's something about making something that is so good and like operates so well on so many different levels, commercial, creative, et cetera. That like the feeling of like can you keep going? Can you top it? And like at what point do we call it? You know, because you can't make the same thing forever and keep it as good. I think that's like the creative challenge of television.
This episode was produced by Thomas Low and Jessica Beck.
It was edited by the club Beat Store.
It was also our executive producer. It was mixed by Veronic Coo Retriguez. Our senior producer is Naomi Sham. Elizabeth Ponso is our senior editor. Sage Bauman is our head of Podcasts.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gerra Special thanks to Reinica, Gregory Abel, and Mave.
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