Prime Video has ordered romantic comedy Five Blind Dates as its first Australian Amazon original feature, which will begin shooting next month.
The story was created by US comedian Nathan Ramos-Park and China-born Australian actor Shuang Hu, who plays a woman that is told by a fortune teller that she will meet her soulmate on one of the next five dates she goes on.
It will be directed by Australia’s Shawn Seet, who is known primarily for TV series such as The Code but has made features including 2019 family drama Storm Boy, which starred Geoffrey Rush and played Zurich Film Festival.
Filming on Five Blind Dates will take place in Sydney and Townsville, in Far North Queensland, produced by Goalpost Pictures Australia. Goalpost’s Kylie du Fresne is producing with business partners Ben Grant and Rosemary Blight as executive producers.
Romantic comedies are not regularly made in Australia but one recent success was Goalpost’s Top End Wedding, which premiered at Sundance in 2019. Amazon Studios approached the production company when the the project was in its infancy.
Hu’s character runs her late grandmother’s tea shop in a little seen part of Sydney and producer du Fresne said the film would be a “love letter to Sydney”.
The announcement was made today (March 29) at Screen Producers Australia’s annual conference during a live video address delivered by Erika North, the LA-based Australian who is head of originals for Asia Pacific at Amazon Studios.
She said Amazon wanted features with an event feel and ideas that bring people together. North also mentioned a sense of place as being important to the Australian shows they commission – and that everything made will be available in 240 countries and territories worldwide.
Since 2019, more than A$150m ($112.5m) has been invested by Amazon into 14 original series in Australia.
North highlighted three upcoming scripted series being made in Australia: an adaptation of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, starring Sigourney Weaver, from Made Up Stories; Class of ’07, a “high concept post-apocalyptic comedy” from Matchbox Pictures; and comedy series Deadloch, filmed in Tasmania, from popular comedy duo ‘The Kates’ – Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney.
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