How Renowned Films Hustles, Disrupts and Thrives With Shows on the Likes of Elvis Presley, Jeffrey Dahmer

How Renowned Films Hustles, Disrupts and Thrives With Shows on the Likes of Elvis Presley, Jeffrey Dahmer

Elvis Presley? Check! Charles Manson? Done! Jeffrey Dahmer? Yes! Dr. Phil? Upcoming. Production company Renowned Films, which is operating between London and Los Angeles, has quietly built a transatlantic unscripted business with shows about big names and an unconventional approach focused on fast development cycles, access-led storytelling with an eye on younger audiences, and direct-to-network or streamer sales, along with full rights retention.

The themes of hustling, disruption, digital production, and serving ideas with a twist to U.S. buyers to cut through in a competitive industry dominated by legacy studios keep coming up during a meeting with Renowned CEO Max Welch, president Duane Jones, and chief operating officer Tim Withers. They have taken time out of their busy schedule to discuss their business approach and such success stories as Making Manson on NBCUniversal streamer Peacock, Loving Elvis on Prime Video, My Son Jeffrey: The Dahmer Family Tapes on Fox, Deadly Waters With Captain Lee on Peacock, and E! Dirty Rotten Scandals: The Dr. Phil Show, which is set to hit E! in 2026.

Without a studio deal or traditional packaging, the young trio’s goal has been to build an independent empire from the backstreets of London to the heart of Hollywood.

Jones, a former BBC radio host, tells THR that he “kind of fell into radio, honestly, just out of love for music. But I’ve always wanted to push the boundaries with content creation. Obviously, content is king, and I’ve always had my eye on creating content.” He ended up seeing an opportunity for a magazine show bringing together artists who had made a name for themselves with self-produced music videos.

More than a decade later, he met Welch and Withers. “I felt they are really innovative guys, future-facing, technical guys who are artistic but do not put art over content,” Jones recalls. “Everything they wanted to make had substance. So, our goals and tastes were aligned in terms of what we wanted to do. We are all very different individually, but I think our purpose was to meet and to create Renowned and make content with a voice.”

Welch has the brain for business strategy, while Withers understands the ins and outs of production and other technology, as well as financials. “And I tag along and bring in my ideas,” Jones says with a laugh.

Withers and Welch were still at university when the trio started working together. “We did a whole range of different projects together, and then we got kind of sick of uni. I wasn’t really for us. We were actually doing real things,” Welch recalls. “We said we haven’t done 10 years at the BBC or 20 years at Banijay. Let’s just start a production company and see what we can do. Believing that we had access through Dwayne, we were ambitious and stupid and naive, thinking we could just get into networks. So, we started Renowned in 2012, and then we actually did. We got our first show as Renowned about six months after starting the company.”

The show was Winner’s Circle on Sky, which provided behind-the-scenes access to top U.K. soccer stars. Branded content series FCUK, which followed Olympic Gold medalist boxer Anthony Joshua, and content for online music platform Vevo, such as interviews with top music stars, also helped the firm make a name for itself.

The formula for Winner’s Circle became the firm’s calling card: fresh factual entertainment or documentary content focused on stories and names that young audiences care about, produced with the latest technology. “We were making the most of new technology that was coming out, producing something that looked really high-end on next to nothing,” highlights Welch. “I worked on sets with the first RED camera that ever arrived in London, learning about it. So, I was one of the first who actually knew how to set it up and use it. So we took all that knowledge and made our show, which Duane hosted, and we shot, produced, directed, edited, did everything, all just the three of us on next to nothing.”

Bootstrapping was also the name of the game before the Renowned team got a headquarters. Whether blagging a sofa shop as the location for an interview shoot or meeting people at London’s South Bank Center or in the cafes of bookstores, the team did it all to succeed without the need for huge budgets. “At Waterstones as well, they’ve got cafe areas,” Jones shares. “We would buy books, sit in the cafe area for work meetings, and return the books at the end of the day and get the refund. That was our office space.”

No traditional industry education, no problem, the Renowned team says. “We just learned how to do things by instinct,” explains Jones. “The landscape of production has changed vastly, and not being traditionally trained means that we kind of created our own business models, acumen, and strategy, so to speak, and it just works. It’s all about instinct and understanding audiences.” He adds: “It’s all about the DIY generation and real hustle, bypassing gatekeepers on all levels. Let’s get it done!”

Early on, industry execs were surprised to meet three young guys in pitch meetings. “We would all sit down with these execs who were expecting a bunch of 50-year-old guys,” Withers recalls. “And they were sort of like, ‘What are you doing?’ And we were like: ‘We’ve got all the biggest music artists in the world and a global brand signed up to make this program. Do you want it on your platform?” And they were like: ‘Yeah!’ We’ve had that kind of hustle mindset that has carried on to this day.”

Another element of the Renowned model came into play early on. “That first show did really well. We ended up keeping the rights to it and sold it to 60 territories, which helped us get a bit of breathing space to do more development,” Welch tells THR. “So we got our next show, F2 Kicks Off [about a British freestyle soccer duo bringing its feats to international soccer stars, chart-topping musicians and regular people], which was better funded, but still did not have a huge budget. It was maybe one of the first shows that ever used YouTube talent on TV, but did so in a way that it elevated what they were doing to a much bigger audience and also opened up the network to a younger audience. And that was the highest-rated show in that spot on the network. And it proved that we can make a show for Channel 4 that will look really elevated and premium, but the budget will still not be as big as if you’re doing a global Netflix show, which we’re also doing, and that takes a different style of treatment.”

The early success drew attention – and eventually an investment. In 2015, U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 acquired a minority stake in Renowned. But that DIY and hustle mindset remained.

The company’s ability to work with different scales and budgets and its team’s interest in stories from beyond the pond then allowed Renowned to move beyond a U.K. focus. In 2017, Catfish producer Critical Content acquired a stake in Renowned, while Channel 4 exited its stake. Critical Content CEO Tom Forman joined the company’s board.

The two companies’ mindsets matched. “Tom was all about doing the best project possible, but also knocking on every door until you got a yes,” says Welch. “I think that’s something that we’re quite good at still. We don’t really take no for an answer, and we’ll keep going until we get a yes on a project.”

2018 was the year that would prove to become, as the Renowned team calls it, a “pivotal” moment. “We’d done the U.K., we’d worked with a lot of the U.K. networks, but all of the shows we were developing, and all of the access and all the characters, were U.S.-centric,” explains Welch. “So all three of us went out there, met all the networks, met a bunch of production companies out there, and just tried to learn the lay of the land, and what they were looking for. How does it differ from the U.K.?”

The Renowned team then developed a slate with a focus on what they had learned – and got a first show in the form of Bravo’s Million Dollar Rooftops.

Again, the way of working Renowned brought to the table was different. “We pretty much self-funded the pilot, and walked in with it, and they could just see the product in front of them,” Withers tells THR. “We are saying: ‘Here’s the access to the talent, here’s a 10-minute tape of everything, here’s what, realistically, the schedule looks like, here’s a really detailed deck.’ It’s packaged and all ready to go.”

Copwatch America for BET and other projects followed. And while others were hurt by the COVID pandemic, the Renowned team looked at its lessons and new opportunities. “We just sort of looked at each other and said, ‘Why are we spending so much on real estate?’ It’s just killing our margins,” Withers says. “So we scaled it back slightly and made things a bit more remote. Post-production can become really expensive and draining for the bottom line.” And the company invested in an Avid Nexis network. “We can work anywhere globally, with anyone in the world.”

In 2022, Crazy Rich Asians studio SK Global acquired Critical Content and its stake in Renowned, with Forman departing, but the Renowned team was happy with the presence and success it had reached in the U.S. and has continued to push to build it further.

And the networked tech set-up allows the firm to work across borders. “For the series Making Manson for Peacock, we had our showrunner based in Costa Rica,” highlights Withers. “We had our editors working in London and New York. It paid off really well. So, for every show we do, we’re not geolocked. We can bring the best talent from around the world in for a show to make sure that we’re doing it as best we can.”

True crime has become one focus for Renowned. “It speaks to what we’ve always been good at, which is access and finding what’s next or a really exciting way into a subject,” argues Welch. “With Manson, we thought there are always the shows that people rip from the headlines. But if we look at serial killers almost as IP in themselves, Manson is so iconic, and the story hasn’t been retold for a while, certainly not for a younger audience.”

But what approach would make sense? Renowned did a deep dive into research, “spending time getting to know the Manson community, building a lot of trust,” says Welch. “A man who had actually become Manson’s closest confidant for the last 20 years of his life, while he was in prison, trusted us. We started to get to know this guy who has this treasure trove of unknown things about this entire story. And we got tapes with 100-plus hours of first-hand material that we packaged up to make it immersive.”

That’s the Renowned approach to all its true crime projects. “We try to find an iconic story or a crazy story, get the access, get the tapes, or something else that allows us to walk in and make a show, to use a phrase that we’ve come up with, undownturnable.”

But doing all the legwork for this sort of packaging takes much time and effort. “We’re working on projects that we probably won’t be pitching until 2026, so our development process is quite long,” Withers explains. “But that’s what it takes to get a project that you’re going to get instant offers on in the room. We likely have 200-plus ideas, but we’re focusing our time on 10 projects that are all killer projects.”

Loving Elvis is one such example. Again, it looks at an iconic figures through a contemporary lens, exploring the loves, dalliances, and forbidden courtships of Presley.

Having read all this, you may not be surprised to hear that the Renowned office includes a burner phone with a number the team gives out to contributors and “some slightly dodgy characters,” as the team says. And when it rings, there’s usually a surprise on the other side.

Will the company stay focused on true crime, or what does the future of Renowned look like?

“We’re never going to pigeonhole ourselves in one specific area,” says Withers. “The industry is always evolving, so we’re always going to be evolving with it. We just want to be at the forefront of that evolution.”

Jones echoes that. “Yeah, we will just keep it future-facing, keep producing stuff that hopefully moves the needle. It’s a balance between style and the content itself. I hate the term ‘premium.’ But it’s about worthy content that is also in a style that younger generations want to watch. Just give the young people content that they deserve!”