Faraway Road Productions, founded by Israelis Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff, who created the hit shows Fauda and Hit & Run, has been sold to next-generation media company Candle Media in a multimillion-dollar deal backed by investment capital from Blackstone.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but reports said that the price tag for Faraway was under $50 million.
Candle is run by leading entertainment executives Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs. Faraway’s main hit show Fauda is set to premiere season four later this year on Israel’s Yes TV and streaming worldwide on Netflix. Other current development projects include the film Siege of Bethlehem – to be directed by Antoine Fuqua – and a non-scripted spy thriller for Showtime with director Greg Barker.
“Lior and Avi are world-class storytellers who produce exhilarating content that strikes a chord globally with audiences across cultures and languages,” Mayer and Staggs said. “They are exactly the type of partners we and Blackstone are looking to invest behind – and we are excited to work with them to further accelerate Faraway Road’s growth trajectory.”
Joe Baratta, global head of private equity at Blackstone, and David Kestnbaum, a senior managing director at Blackstone, said the firm was proud to back the deal.
“Content creation is one of our highest-conviction investment themes, and we believe that elite talent like the Faraway Road team is exceptionally well positioned to thrive in today’s increasingly global, digital media environment,” the investors said.
Blackstone is the world’s largest alternative asset manager and has $731 billion in assets under management, including investment vehicles focused on private equity, real estate, public debt and equity, life sciences, growth equity, opportunistic non-investment grade credit, real assets and secondary funds.
Faraway Road is best known for creating and producing the critically acclaimed series Fauda, a political thriller in which Raz also stars, based on his and Issacharoff’s time serving in IDF Special Forces.
The series is one of the biggest successes in Israeli television, with all three seasons available for streaming on Netflix and the fourth season in production.
Also airing on Netflix is the action thriller series Hit & Run, starring Raz and Sanaa Lathan, which Issacharoff and Raz cocreated with the award-winning team behind The Killing.
Upcoming for Faraway Road is a robust slate of film and television projects in various stages of development.