EXCLUSIVE: German production house Beetz Brothers Film Production is readying an ARD and Arte crime doc series about Operation Eureka, the largest international police operation against Italy’s ‘Ndrangheta.
Mafia Hunters will tell a five-episode story of how the main investigators launched the operation to topple the Italian mafia group, which has been one of most powerful criminal organizations in the country since the 1980s. The show will include exclusive interviews with the main investigators, archival footage and atmospheric recreations.
The ‘Ndrangheta are estimated to make up to €50B ($52.4B) every year through various criminal activities. They dominate cocaine trafficking from Latin America to Europe and are also involved in arms dealing and other activities. The organization comprised of dozens of families from the Calabria region of southern Italy who loosely form a collective structure. Operation Eureka has involved police forces from across Europe and South America, and led to the arrests of well over 100 individuals.
The doc is being billed as a flagship 2025 project for ARD in Germany and Franco-German channel Arte. Stefano Strocchi and Veronika Kaserer are the directors and Christian Beetz and Georg Tschurtschenthaler are producing with support from the German Motion Picture Fund, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Filmstiftung NRW and IDM Film Commission Südtirol.
OneGate Media has distribution rights, and is shopping it ahead of a debut on TV in January next year. Beetz Brothers has also lined up a three-part version and a 90-min feature for linear channels.
Since selling 50% of its equity to Leonine Studios in 2022, as we revealed at the time, Beetz Brothers has focused on premium documentaries, particularly forging a niche in European true crime docs such as Netflix originals A Perfect Crime and Crime Scene Berlin — Nightlife Killer, ARD’s award winner Reeperbahn — Special Unit 65.
Mafia Hunters becomes the latest off the production line, Beetz Brother co-founder Christian Beetz told Deadline he believes the genre, which has fuelled global streamers’ unscripted slates, is running out of gas and has led to the need for innovation in development, along with a return of “an old standard in documentary storytelling, with much greater diversity in content and form.”
“Overall, the true crime genre has almost exhausted its narrative potential, prompting us to develop a completely new genre mix for Amazon Prime: Comedy meets true crime, with our series German Cocaine Cowboy and Billions Mike focusing heavily on entertainment and storytelling with a twist. Essentially, these are comedies about crooks,” he said.
The international docs market remains challenged, with the traditional European pubcasters struggling to fund big-ticket items and streamers more focused on talent-driven and sports-themed titles. With Leonine’s backing, particularly in the shape of a development pot, Beetz Brothers has focused on high-end, German-language docs in true crime, investigative stories such as Sky’s Juan Carlos: Downfall of the King and sports docs including FC Barcelona Confidential and RTL and Blue Ant racing doc #Racegirl — The Comeback of Sophia Floersch.
“As the international market has changed to a stronger national focus, we are primarily concentrating on German-language high-end productions in Germany, which are primarily spread across those three main genres,” said Beetz.
Beetz noted that investigative docs such as Juan Carlos, which sold through NBCUniversal to more than 45 countries, and Netflix’scrime doc The Tinder Swindler and political series The Young Berlusconi remained of the moment.
“Investigative journalism no longer means just dry, informative content but can also be character-driven and entertaining. This is very complex, as the story is no longer told from the outside, but from the inside by people who are part of it.
However, he questioned how long sports would dominate doc slates. “Documentaries about big celebrities like Netflix’s Beckham are market drivers, showing their protagonists closely and intimately like never seen before, but the number of major sports IPs is limited, and even Netflix’s approach to narrating entire sports, as masterfully done with Drive to Survive or Tour de France seems to become exhausted,” said Beetz.
Boom To Bust
News of Mafia Hunters comes as Amsterdam’s IDFA docs fest continues in the Netherlands, and execs debate and privately chatter about the health and recovery of a challenged market for the genre.
When Beetz Brothers joined the Leonine stable, Beetz describes the documentary industry as being “in the midst of a big boom, and the international streaming war was in full swing.”
However, this led to more companies opening doc divisions and start-ups emerging, making talent more scarce just as market contraction began to take hold. “Even to this day in Europe, there are relatively few talents in the documentary field with the necessary experience in developing and executing ‘streaming-like’ prime documentaries,” said Beetz.
For Beetz Brothers, the hire of showrunner Tschurtschenthaler as Chief Creative Officer was a significant move, as was the financial, legal and creative support for Leonine. “This has led to an even higher performance, allowing us to act faster and more professionally in an increasingly complex environment,” said Beetz.
The came the industry-wide market contraction that has hit everywhere from the U.S. to Asia. “Currently, we’re experiencing a tough market correction following the bursting of the bubble and significantly declining order volumes in the industry,” said Beetz. “This is happening in Germany and in the western world.
“Some of the newly established documentary companies have already disappeared from the market or downsized. Some of the old dinosaurs disappeared. The number of high-end series in the documentary sector, like in the fiction sector, has significantly decreased. Even ARD — the largest player in the German documentary market — is implementing its announcement to reduce the number of documentaries. The market hasn’t returned to where it was a few years ago. it has fundamentally changed.”
The result has been focus on productions that cost-effective and made in volume, and “flagship” productions that “must stand out from the increasing white noise” of the streaming world. “Productions that would fit in between those two extremes have largely vanished,” said Beetz.
Beetz claimed that “well-told documentaries garner much more attention and audience compared with expensive fiction,” but noted the picture of what doc making in 2025 will look like is still developing.
“The big question is what’s next? We are currently witnessing a resurgence of docu-soaps or docu-follows in the celebrity sector,” said Beetz. “These focus on high-quality entertainment and on exclusivity. However, celebrities are a scarce commodity, and we realize that the art of storytelling is becoming increasingly important again. This involves mixing genres and finding new, relevant perspectives in already known stories. This seems to close a circle after the hype.”
