As the fifth anniversary of the Oct. 1 mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas approaches, streaming service Paramount + will debut 11 Minutes, a four-part docuseries about the massacre, on Sept. 27.
The documentary takes its name from the amount of time the shooter fired down on the crowd from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, leaving 58 people dead and more than 800 injured. It is the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
Produced by See It Now Studios, the documentary includes the first in-depth interview with Jason Aldean, who was performing on stage when the shooting began, as well as first-person stories from concert attendees and first responders, including members of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Sunrise Hospital trauma teams and FBI agents. Helmed by Emmy and Peabody-winning director Jeff Zimbalist, the film also draws from police bodycam footage and 200 hours of cell phone video.
In the trailer premiering below, Aldean, media personality Storme Warren — who was emceeing the event from the stage — and other participants share their stories of excitement about the multi-artist, multi-day festival and how their anticipation gave way to horror as the terrifying scene unfolded. The film also focuses on the day’s heroes, both expected and surprising, who risked their lives to save others.
“Vegas was always one of the shows for me I always looked forward to,” Aldean says. “It was like any other day, crews are out, working, getting ready for the show.”
But as the first bullets rained down at 10:06 p.m., “that’s when the world changed for us,” Warren says. “We watched the people fall in the crowd. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.”
The intense footage includes scenes of the police moving toward the shooter’s room, with SWAT office Levi Hancock adding, “I don’t think there was any one of us that thought we were coming out the same way that we went in.”
Since its launch in September 2021, See It Now Studios, helmed by former CBS News head Susan Zirinsky, has developed and produced such projects as Race Against Time: The CIA and 9/11, Watergate: High Crimes in the White House and Ghislaine—Partner in Crime.
