ThreeNow to Bingefest Kings Cross Thriller

ThreeNow will offer for binge streaming the Paramount+ Australia true-crime dramatisation Last King of the Cross from May 5.

Inspired by John Ibraim’s autobiography, it launched across the Tasman in February, when The Guardian dubbed “this drama about Sydney’s ‘mecca of sin’ … forgettable machismo.”

“It’s not the first time Ibrahim has been dramatised on screen – the third Underbelly series, The Golden Mile, covered roughly the same territory – Kings Cross in the 1990s – [and it] doesn’t stray too far from the Underbelly template,” the Sydney Morning Herald said.

But trade paper ScreenHub called it “a more polished series in just about every way … Last King of the Cross is here to make audiences feel nostalgic for Australia’s golden age of bribery, bashings and police corruption: Sydney’s King’s Cross in the ’80s and ’90s.”

Here’s the media release:

LAST KING OF THE CROSS PREMIERES ON THREE NOW

20 April 2023 – Warner Bros. Discovery ANZ is proud to announce Last King of the Cross ‘bingefest’, all episodes premiering on ThreeNow on May 5, 2023

Inspired by John Ibrahim’s best-selling autobiography, Last King of The Cross is an operatic story of two brothers, John (Lincoln Younes) and Sam Ibrahim (Claude Jabbour) who organise the street but lose each other in their ascent to power.

The elevated serialised drama tracks John Ibrahim’s rise from a poverty-stricken immigrant with no education, no money, and no prospects, to Australia’s most  infamous nightclub mogul in Sydney’s Kings Cross – a mini-Atlantic City, barely half a mile long with every form of criminality on offer.

Told in 10 parts, the drama spans John Ibrahim’s formative decades from a young child in 1978 in war torn Tripoli, Lebanon – through to the arrival of the family in Australia in the  1980s (specifically Sydney’s Western Suburbs which is where the family lived), and his ultimate rise in Kings Cross.

Last King of The Cross is a HELIUM Pictures production for Paramount+ Australia with Cineflix Rights as the exclusive international distribution partner.

Produced by Mark Fennessy and Karl Zwicky, and executive produced by Mark Fennessy and John Ibrahim, it was written by Kieran Darcy-Smith, Morgan O’Neill, Jane Allen, Alastair Newton Brown, Matt Nable and James Pope, and directed by Kieran Darcy-Smith, Grant Brown, Catherine Millar and Ian Watson.