Campfire Studios Is Known For True-Crime & Cheerleaders. Now It’s Working With One Direction Members & Diving Into The Dating World

EXCLUSIVE: Campfire Studios has been front and central of the true-crime boom of recent years with documentaries including Netflix’s Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, My Father, The BTK Killer, The Menendez Brothers and American Murder: Laci Peterson.

But the company, founded by Jiro Dreams of Sushi producer Ross Dinerstein, is keen to demonstrate its agnosticism towards genres as the business behind Netflix’s America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleadersas well as feature thriller We Bury The Dead, which stars Daisy Ridley, pop-culture doc Andy Kaufman Is Mewhich premiered at Tribeca last year and a new show featuring two members of boy band One Direction.

It’s now starting to get into the dating world and Dinerstein has a new producing partner to do it with.

Dinerstein told Deadline that the firm is currently developing its first dating competition format.

“A great idea is a great idea,” he said. “We’d like to do it our way. It has a really elevated twist to it. It’s not Bachelor in Paradisewhich I love and watch, but it is a little different than what we’ve done in the past. I think we can sort of use the skills that we have currently and make a version of a dating competition show that we can still be proud of.”

The project, which Dinerstein wouldn’t reveal details of, is in the early stages of development and has yet to be taken out to buyers. “We’re storytellers, we want to be able to make sure that there’s an underlying note behind it. It doesn’t need to be a message. We know a dating show isn’t going to change the world, but it’s relatable. It’s more grounded in reality, less a reality show,” he said.

The line between reality series and docuseries is getting thinner all the time.

Netflix greenlit America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaderswhich has been renewed for a third season, two years after Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making The Team ended its 16-year run on Paramount cable network CMT in 2022. Dinerstein calls his show a fly-on-the-wall documentary series.

“I don’t bristle at the word reality series, but I don’t think [America’s Sweethearts] is a reality series. I’m not afraid of that word, but that is not a reality series. It’s reality-adjacent. Often when we talk to real life people, we explain the difference between a documentary or documentary series and a reality series? I use that show as an example. The old version of the show is a reality series,” he added.

Campfire is also working another docuseries featuring One Direction stars Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik, two people familiar with reality television, having originally formed on The X Factor.

The untitled three-parter follows the pair as they travel across the U.S. and discuss the tragic death of their bandmate Liam Payne. It is directed by Nicola Marsh.

“It is not a One Direction show; it is a show about Louis and Zayn, formerly of One Direction, who are reconnecting via a road trip,” he added. “These two guys who have lost touch because life happens, are reconnecting as they’re experiencing America. They’re both Brits and have spent quite a lot of time over here but that time has been on a tour bus with an entourage. This is truly them going town-to-town, reconnecting, having some fun and getting to know people.”

All of this comes as its true-crime projects continue to kill it, largely on Netflix.

Unknown Number: The High School Catfish was the streamer’s 13^th most-watched movie of the second half of last year with 56.8M views, ahead of Oscar-nominated The Perfect Neighbor and even Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

My Father, The BTK Killer was also in the top 100 with 18.4M views between its launch in October and the end of the year, putting it ahead of George Clooney and Adam Sandler film Jay Kelly.

Dinerstein said that Unknown Number “broke the internet”. “I felt confident that that show was going to do very well, but I don’t think anyone could have predicted how popular it was, on a global basis, which is very exciting,” he added.

But he pointed to My Father, The BTK Killer as the “quintessential” Campfire project. The doc tells the story of Kerri Rawson, the daughter of Dennis Rader, better known as the BTK Killer, who murdered at least ten people in Kansas between 1974 and 1991.

“There’s been quite a few documentaries over the years about the BTK killer, and we would never do anything that is paint by numbers, so, in telling a story that people think they know, we told it from the point of view of his daughter, which is very on brand for type of storytelling we do,” he said. “We focused on finding characters that are both relatable, sympathetic, but also almost stranger than fiction.”

Dinerstein said he would never want to make a true-crime doc that is “down the line”. He pointed to its film American Murder: Laci Peterson about the case of the Modesto woman who was killed when she was eight months pregnant. Her husband, Scott Peterson was later convicted of her murder.

It came out around the same time that Peacock launched Universal Television’s Face to Face with Scott Petersonwhich featured his first interview in decades from prison, where he is still processioning his innocence.

“The other one was trying to create a water cooler moment of [whether] Scott Peterson was guilty or not. That’s not what would be interesting for Campfire. What we made gave Laci a voice,” he added.

True-crime is showing no sign of slowing down. “I definitely think it’s going to continue. There’s still going to be more clickbait. There’s already been a Rob Reiner murder documentary. Campfire wouldn’t make that documentary because we don’t know how it’s going to unfold. It’s just too early in the process,” he added.

Another doc that Campfire is making fits somewhere in the true-crime space, albeit in a financial sense. The Straight Line: The Real Wolf of Wall Street tells the story of Jordan Belfort, who was played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the Martin Scorsese movie.

Campfire is working on the project with AI company Wonder Studios, of which Dinerstein is an investor. He said that he “cannot ignore” the new technology but wanted to invest in the company to learn more about it.

“I believe that AI was not going away and was only going to get become more and more part of the process,” he said. “It was either go to graduate school and learn about it, or part of the condition of my investment was I’m going to ask a ton of questions.”

Talking of investors, Campfire is backed by Brent Montgomery’s Wheelhouse. When Dinerstein initially launched the company in 2014, he was backed by Content Media, which later become Kew Media Group, the business that collapsed in 2020. Wheelhouse acquired a majority stake in Campfire November 2019.

Wheelhouse CEO Montgomery told Deadline, “What’s most impressive to me is Campfire’s ability to execute across vastly different genres and mediums, from true crime and sports to scripted features. From BTK and Unknown Number to the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and We Bury the Deadtheir output is ridiculously diverse but always top quality. It’s a testament to Ross’s vision of making Campfire a premier canvas that attracts and fiercely supports the best storytellers in the business.”

Campfire has also made some personnel changes over the last few months. Deadline understands that Rebecca Evans, who was EVP, Non-Fiction Content, left the company in October, having spent seven years at Campfire. She worked on over 35 series and films including Unknown Number and America’s Sweethearts as well as HBO Max’s The Way Down: God, Greed and the Cult of Gwen Shamblinand Low Country: The Murdaugh Dynasty.

“We had a great run. We’re still very good friends but it was an organic time in our relationship, for us to go our different ways. I wish her luck, she’s awesome,” Dinerstein said.

Replacing her is Anne Hazlett, who produced Netflix’s Amy Bradley Is Missinga Netflix true-crime docuseries that drew over 36M views over the last half of the year, beating out even The Hunting Wives, who has joined as SVP, Non-Fiction Content. She was previously VP, Development at Ample Entertainment, which produced Amy Bradley Is Missingand also worked on series including Hulu’s Beauty Queen Killer: 9 Days of Terror and Roku’s Morimoto’s Sushi Masterhaving joined from Lightbox, where she worked on Showtime’s Supervillain: The Making of Tekashi 6ix9ine and HBO Max’s The Fastest Woman on Earth.

Coming up in 2026, Dinerstein hopes to see the wide release of Andy Kaufman Is Mewhich features never-before-heard audio tapes that the iconic comedian made during his life, and it is also in post-production on another bio-doc about another comedian for Netflix.

“There’s a couple kind of white whale celebrity pop culture people that we’re trying to have discussions with that would be an honor to tell their story,” he added.