Amazon has ordered a documentary series to go from Starbucks. “This is Football” will span the globe and tell six stories about the global power of soccer. Veteran producer and film exec Joe Roth, an owner of the Seattle Sounders team, will exec produce the series. It will go out in the U.S. and internationally as an Amazon original. U.K. indie October Films, known for its series for U.K. broadcasters including “Walking the Nile” and “Walking the Americas,” is making...
Roth Kirschenbaum Films
Joe
Roth
Roth scored with the global blockbusters “Alice in Wonderland” ($1 billion-plus), “Maleficent” ($758 million), “Snow White and the Huntsman” ($396 million) and “Oz the Great and Powerful” ($493 million).
With a career that spans five decades and some 65 films and TV projects, Roth has been both a top studio executive at Fox, Universal and Disney, and his own producing boss at Revolution Studios. The New Yorker founded Revolution in 2000 as a strategic partnership with Starz Entertainment, Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox, and the company went on to release a wide range of notable and crowd-pleasing films, including “Black Hawk Down,” “Maid in Manhattan,” “Anger Management” and “Daddy Day Care.”
But it was never able to deliver a true blockbuster hit, had its fair share of disappointments such as “Gigli” and “Hollywood Homicide,” and stopped film production in 2007. Such setbacks only served to galvanize Roth who has since become one of the most successful indie producers in the business, with hits ranging from the faith-based surprise breakout “Heaven Is for Real,” which grossed an impressive $101 million against a lean $12 million budget, to the billion-dollar-grossing “Alice in Wonderland.” Currently working on “Maleficient,” “XXX” and “Oz” sequels.
