Nearly 45 years after first terrifying movie audiences with a trip to the ocean in 1975's Jaws, director Steven Spielberg is gearing up to once again give fans jolts of fear with a brand new project. That's right, horror fans. We're getting a "super scary" new TV series from one of the greatest filmmakers that's ever lived. And he wants people to only be able to watch it after midnight.
What Is Steven Spielberg's New Horror Project?
First things first: Steven Spielberg's new horror project doesn't have an official title yet, but it's being dubbed Spielberg's After Dark presentation. He is apparently fairly deep into the creative process, too. According to Spielberg's former Dreamworks producer partner Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Ready Player One director has already written "four or five chapters" of the project, which is expected to to make up around 10-12 chapters.
Here's how Katzenberg described it at the Banff World Media Festival (via Deadline):
Steven Spielberg has a super scary story. He’s actually writing it himself. Getting him to write something is fantastic.
It's beyond exciting to get a transcendent talent like Steven Spielberg working on a fictional TV series in general, since he tends to get more invested with unscripted projects television efforts. However, it's enjoyably frustrating that so little information was revealed, leaving us to use our overactive imaginations to think about what he's doing.
The whole "chapter" approach almost makes it sound like this could be an anthology project in tune with Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone. The latter is a particularly fitting comparative element, considering he both produced and co-directed 1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie alongside John Landis. Spielberg is also known for the Amazing Stories anthology, but we'll have to wait and see just how serialized and connected this new project is.
Where And When Will Steven Spielberg's Horror Series Air?
This particularly factoid will probably surprise a lot of people, as Steven Spielberg isn't penning this new project for any broadcast or cable networks, or even any currently up-and-running streaming services. The horror series will actually be produced for Jeffrey Katzenberg's upcoming digital platform Quibi, which has been in the middle of all kinds of news stories recently. So does that mean this will be a short-form series?
No release window has been set for Steven Spielberg's new project, but he claimed Steven Spielberg aims to make the show only available to viewers after the witching hour. Katzenberg claims that his business partner Meg Whitman came up with a plan to add a clock to the Quibi player that allows subscribers to watch the horror show only during the allotted hours. No breakfast-time scares for Spielberg.
While it remains to be seen if this night-only viewing plan will work, it's certainly a lofty idea to kick around. Plus, it could lead to some interesting shifts in how decisions get made by content creators for streaming sites.
The highly audacious new service Quibi is set to launch in the U.S. on April 6, 2020, with around $1 billion being spent on content to get investors and potential subscribers pumped. The price for the service will be $4.99 a month, and its videos are expected to span the 7-10 minute range. It's unclear if every single one of the platform's projects will be that long, or if some original series will be longer than certain others.
In any case, viewers have a lot to be excited about whenever Quibi gets here. Beyond the Steven Spielberg project, the service is also planning the racially charged drama #Freerayshawn with Lawrence Fishburne, an untitled Steven Soderbergh project, reboots of Singled Out and Punk'd, and Anna Kendrick and Donal Logue's new comedy Dummy.
Steven Spielberg is currently also busy putting together a big screen remake of West Side Story, which some may think sounds scarier than anything that could happen on his impending Quibi horror series.
