Flush with that sweet Warner Bros. cash, gaming website-turned-new media company Machinima presented its slate of upcoming web-series programming at the Digital Media NewFronts yesterday, and, in a word, it’s spooky. Stacked with cult-favorite creators like Bruce Timm and Clive Barker—and, uh, Roberto Orci—Machinima’s lineup focuses on sci-fi, horror, and gaming-oriented programming in order to appeal to its stated audience of males 18-34, a woefully underserved demographic in today’s media landscape. But whatever, it all sounds pretty cool.
First among the proposed new content is a second season of Timm’s Justice League: Gods And Monsters, the Justice League cartoon series that hangs out at Denny’s all night and only orders a coffee. The series, which reimagines DC superheroes as darker versions of themselves—that’s where the vampire Batman comes in—was renewed in advance of its first season, which debuts in June.
Then there’s a new web series, Clive Barker’s Creepy Pasta. As the title implies, the series will explore the unsettling world of “creepypasta,” or online horror fan fiction, the phenomenon that sparked such 21st-century boogeymen as The Slender Man and Ben Drowned. Barker—whose involvement seems appropriate, considering the Creepypasta Wiki features a Hellraiser quote on its homepage—will be curating stories submitted by creepypasta writers and adapting them into “an original series of live-action, blood-curdling short films,” although it’s not clear if he will be directing those short films or not.
Equally unsettling, but for different reasons, is a new RoboCop web series, RoboCops, which promises to let viewers “ride along with the now standard-issue RoboCop officers” in Delta City. Ride along inside their heads, even, as “the series is shot from the first-person point of view of the RoboCop officers’ heads-up display, along with security cameras, dash-cams and drones.” Taking a Dramamine before watching the series is presumably recommended.
Other shows on Machinima’s docket include the aforementioned Roberto Orci project, High School 51, which stars now-ex Sleepy Hollow cast member Orlando Jones and is about a top-secret government high school where the students are “cool, quirky, attractive and… well, alien.” Other new series picked up include a superhero reality competition series called DC Hero Project, a live-action adaptation of DC’s Dial H For Hero (here retitled #4Hero), and a couple of web series based on the games Happy Wheels and on YouTube Star JeromeASF’s Minecraft videos.