Turns out being adorable is good for business.
“It’s a huge opportunity,” Screen Australia CEO Deirdre Brennan said of the moment now facing the country’s screen industry. The math backs her up: a new government-backed study credits BLUEY as the flagship name behind a screen and games sector now worth $7.9 billion to Australia’s economy, according to Variety, which broke the story Aug. 18.
The figure comes from Screen Currency, a sweeping Screen Australia research project billed as the government screen agency’s most thorough look at the industry’s worth in more than a decade. Researchers surveyed over 13,750 people, ran six separate surveys and consulted 40 industry stakeholders across 18 research partnerships to build the picture, according to IF Magazine, which covered the report’s companion findings the same week.
Beyond the headline number, the broader study found Australia’s screen and games businesses contributed $11 billion to the economy in 2023/24, employed nearly 70,000 people in 2024/25 and shipped $1.6 billion worth of exports overseas that same year. BLUEY, the Brisbane-made cartoon about a family of blue heelers, has spent years as the country’s most visible export, streaming into homes worldwide well past its intended preschool audience.
The same report turned up a wrinkle worth noting for anyone raising kids on Australian shows. Only 36% of Australians say local content is easy to find, even though 84% say having access to it matters and 75% want to watch more of it.
Related: BLUEY Continues to Fetch Viewers — Here’s Why
“If we had seen that value wasn’t there, then we’d have a much harder task to face than we do now,” Brennan added, tying that access gap directly back to the opportunity she sees ahead. Screen Producers Australia CEO Matthew Deaner put the same problem more bluntly.
“Making Australian content available somewhere within a streaming catalogue is not the same as making it visible to Australian audiences,” Deaner said, according to IF Magazine. “Prominence, discoverability and meaningful promotion of Australian content need to be part of the conversation about how we ensure Australians continue to see their own stories on screen.”
None of that discoverability trouble seems to have slowed BLUEY down. The Heeler family’s antics topped Nielsen’s streaming charts through the first half of 2025 with more than 25 billion viewing minutes, and Movieguide® has followed the show’s staying power for exactly the reasons this new study quantifies in dollars: warm, unhurried storytelling about a dad who shows up and plays.
Movieguide® nominated BLUEY for a Teddy Bear Award for its “strong moral worldviews” and singled out the episode “The Sign” for teaching kids lessons about trusting a bigger plan and honoring elders. That same creative team, led by series creator Joe Brumm, now has a theatrical movie, THE BLUEY MOVIE, headed to theaters on Aug. 6, 2027, through Ludo Studio and BBC Studios.
A cartoon dog family becoming a measurable slice of a nation’s GDP might sound like an odd headline. But it’s really a reminder that decency and craftsmanship travel further than executives tend to bet on. Families gravitated to BLUEY because it respects them, not because a spreadsheet told it to — and now the spreadsheet has caught up.
Read Next: Bluey “The Sign” & “Ghostbasket” Review
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