Greg Maclean: Last News

EXCLUSIVE: Film finance and sales company Concourse Media and production outfit CinemaWays have greenlighted action-horror pic Graveyard Smash, which will roll cameras this year. 

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Filming is now underway in Australia on “Desert King,” a neo-western drama series for Netflix that is positioned to be one of the streamer’s iconic prestige productions in the Asia-Pacific region. The story revolves around money and power in Australia’s harsh Outback regions with filming locations in the remote Northern Territory and near Adelaide, South Australia. When the world’s largest cattle station is left without a clear successor, generational clashes threaten to tear the Lawson family apart. Sensing this once great dynasty is in decline, the outback’s most powerful factions – rival cattle barons, desert gangsters, Indigenous elders and billionaire miners – move in for the kill,” says Netflix by way of a synopsis. While describing the six-part series as “one of the largest local screen productions filmed in both the [Northern] Territory and South Australia,” and “an extraordinary cast,” the streamer has not disclosed the identities of any cast. Directed by Greg McLean (“La Brea,” “Wolf Creek”), the show is a joint production between Easy Tiger and Ronde.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Three years into its local production effort in Australia and New Zealand, Netflix has greenlighted two new series, one feature film and one full-length documentary from Australia. These are in addition to previously announced renewals of teen series “Heartbreak High” and “Surviving Summer” and the go-ahead for prestige book-to-series adaptation “Boy Swallows Universe” and kids animation “Eddie’s Lil Homies.” Set in the Australian Outback, epic succession tale “Desert King” revolves around billionaire miners, traditional owners, cowboys and desert gangsters fighting over the world’s biggest cattle station the size of Wales.

EXCLUSIVE: Luke Arnold, Bella Heathcote and Jay Ryan are set to lead Scrublands, a TV adaptation of Chris Hammer’s novel for Australian streamer Stan.

Left For Dead: How I Survived 71 Days Lost in a Desert Hell, he said he had in fact stopped for three men who had run out of petrol. He said he had offered to give one of the men a lift to a petrol station and that he could have been drugged in his drink or even stabbed with a syringe during a struggle.