A while back, J.J. Abrams — the guy behind the new Star Wars trilogy, the last crop of Star Trek movies, and a lot more — signed a fantastically lucrative deal with WarnerMedia. We already know of at least one project on the way under that deal — The Pinkerton, a “supernatural revenge thriller” mashed up with a western — and now, WarnerMedia has let us know about three new projects Abrams and his company, Bad Robot, are bringing to HBO Max, a new streaming service due out next month.
First up, we have Duster, written by Abrams and The Walking Dead writer LaToya Morgan. “Set in the 1970’s Southwest, the life of a gutsy getaway driver for a growing crime syndicate goes from awful to wildly, stupidly, dangerously awful.” That sounds fun enough, but it doesn’t have ghosts or superheroes in it, so I’m a little more interested in the other projects.
We’re also getting Overlook, “a horror-thriller series inspired by and featuring iconic characters from Stephen King’s masterpiece The Shining. Overlook explores the untold, terrifying stories of the most famous haunted hotel in American fiction.”
This sounds like an anthology series to me. Can you see it? We visit the iconic Overlook Hotel at different points in its history, exploring some of the messed up things that have happened there over the years. There’s the episode about the creepy tub women, the one about the weird mask party, the one with the two spooky hallway girls, and so on. It could serve as a follow-up to Castle Rock on Hulu, another show that dives deep into Stephen King’s mythology.
And finally, there’s a third, untitled series all about the characters from Justice League Dark, which is a grouping of magic-themed superheroes from DC’s vast catalog. The usual suspects include folk like John Constantine, Swamp Thing and Zatanna, although WarnerMedia isn’t giving away any details at the moment.
Warner Bros. and DC have been trying to make something of the Justice League Dark team for the while. Guillermo Del Toro was writing scripts for a project years back, at one point Doug Liman was going to direct a movie, and now Abrams and company are going to take a swing at it. Is this the time they finally get it right? Or or least get it made?
We won’t see any these projects come to fruition for a while, but HBO Max comes out in May. Weirdly, we still don’t know exactly when in May, even though that is fast approaching. Stay tuned.
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h/t The A.V. Club