Hat Trick International ties up further sales for 5’s Rose West doc

BritBox and A+E are among the international buyers for a 5 true-crime documentary on Rose West, as distributor Hat Trick unveils its factual slate ahead of Mipcom.

The BBC Studios-owned streamer has acquired Kalel Productions’ hour-long single Rose West: Born Evil? For its Australian service while A+E has taken it for Germany. It marks a resurrection for the film which launched on 5 in 2021. It has already been licensed to Foxtel, also in Australia, Finland’s TV4, Planete+ France, Avrotros in the Netherlands and TV4 in Sweden.

Its fresh acquisitions underscore HTI’s growing factual slate with the distributor taking three true-crime titles to Mipcom next month.

STV Studios’ three-part BBC3 and BBC Scotland series The Catfish Next Door, which was commissioned in January and is yet to air, leads the slate. The series explores the stranger-than-fiction crimes of one of the UK’s most prolific female cyberstalkers. STV’s doc explores the story of former NHS nurse Adele Rennie who, over a 10-year period, duped numerous women in sophisticated ‘catfish’ campaigns that began online but had devastating real-life consequences for her victims. Now serving her fourth term in prison, Rennie adopted multiple online aliases as she posed as men to lure her victims into her web of deception.

Elsewhere, HTI is shopping two Nine Network Australia documentaries – The Toolbox Murders (2 x 60 minutes) and The Byron Bay Murders ( 2 x 60 minutes) – from Australian indie Perpetual Entertainment in association with UK sales and financing outfit Marmalade Sky.

HTI’s director of sale Sales Sarah Tong said the team has “every confidence that our new true-crime launches will perform as well internationally” as the other titles on the slate, alongside Rose West: Born Evil?, Click For Murder, Killer Women with Piers Morgan and Serial Killer with Piers Morgan.

“All of these titles continue to do buoyant business, particularly in the AVoD space,” she added.