Ryan Murphy Moves to Netflix With Five-Year, $300 Million Deal

Ryan Murphy is saying goodbye to 21st Century Fox and hello to Netflix.

The 9-1-1 and American Horror Story creator will be moving to the streaming giant, Netflix announced Tuesday, poaching the producer from the production company recently acquired by the Walt Disney Company.

The five year deal, first reported by The New York Times, is worth as much as $300 million, making it one of the biggest deals ever made for a television producer.

Murphy’s contract with Fox, where he has spent most of his career, expires in the summer, and he will make the move to Netflix in July.

The producer behind Glee, Nip/Tuck and series like American Crime Story would have played a key role in the expanded Disney universe, and Fox executives reportedly made several attempts to keep him in the company.

Amazon also courted him, reports say, which played a role in driving up the price to this historic number.

“This history of this moment is not lost on me,” Murphy said in a statement. “I am a gay kid from Indiana who moved to Hollywood in 1989 with $55 in savings in my pocket, so the fact that my dreams have crystallized and come true in such a major way is emotional and overwhelming to me.”

Murphy is not the first big producer to move to the streaming service. Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal creator Shonda Rhimes jumped from ABC to Netflix last summer in a $100 million deal.

Murphy’s current series on Fox and FX will not go away any time soon, however. All future seasons of American Crime Story, American Horror Story and Feud will continue to air on FX. The procedural drama, 9-1-1, which has become a sleeper hit, will remain on Fox, and his new drama about the 1980s New York vogue scene, Pose, with a mostly transgender cast, will proceed at FX.

This won’t be Murphy’s first project with Netflix, as he already had a deal with the streaming service for a two-season order of a series centered on Nurse Ratched, the villain from the Ken Kesey novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which was made into an Oscar-winning movie.

In early February, Netflix also signed up for another project from Murphy starring Barbra Streisand and Gwyneth Paltrow. Both projects hail from Fox’s television studio.