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Playtone partners Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, who already had a first look deal to hatch film projects with India-based Reliance Big Entertainment, have expanded the relationship to the web with Electric City, a serial saga about a Sin City-like world that is so electricity-starved that the power gets shut off each night–and bad things happen in the dark. The plan is to make the storyline a multi-platform digital experience with an animated web series, online social game and mobile application.
Hanks only got into Twitter mode this year, when he confirmed my first story break at Deadline, that he was directing and starring in Larry Crowne with Julia Roberts. But Playtone is very ambitious on the web front. I saw some footage of a test run of Electric City late last year, and it is cool atmospheric stuff with a lot of crime and action, and Hanks himself voicing the lead character. Reliance Big’s gaming arm Zapak will manage the whole project.
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Sounds a bit like “City of Ember” – 55M Budget = 8M Gross – “Electric City” you may wanna rethink that one Mr. Hanks.
been trying to deal with people at Zapak and its horrendous out there… if they are managing this, it will die very quickly. no talent there whatsoever. im surprised nothing serious has come out of the Reliance first look deals
Really? That? Oy.
Nice tie in with online games and mobile apps. Who are the protagonists? Cops or citizens?
I lived in NYC during the summer blackout in 2003. What a difference a few decades make. It was actually relaxed and fun. Restaurants gave away food since would have gone bad, people had radios for ballgames and musics and didn’t see a single issue.
And, finally figured out why there were so many old metal bed frames on the roof. Before widespread AC, folks would sleep on the roof of their building when too hot inside. I always assumed a lazy top floor tenant who didn’t want to drag it downstairs to left on roof.
Hope they are paying Jeanne DuPrau a royalty for basing this web series on the “City of Ember” book. It’s obviously either a web adaptation or plagiarism of the novel. What makes no sense is that their movie adaptation cost $50M + and only made $17M WWBO. It was a total stinker. That’s like Larry Ellison’s kid trying to make a sequel to Flyboys. How they think they will possibly make a web series, social game and mobile app more successful than than the movie based on this book, is beyond me. Every time I see old people trying to make content for this space I her Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice saying “We have to make the content for the Twitters, the Facebooks, the Myspaces and the Friendsters, because the kids love it these things.” It’s the generation gap of the Baby Boomers throwing money at kids to try to relate. I feel bad for Reliance that these out of touch Baby Boomers are syphoning their money like they were Japan in the 80′s. I can see Tom Hanks chasing Martians in 2025 to fund his 3D hologram stage play about Hoverboard Racers that all the kids will go crazy for. Can’t Tom Hanks just have dinner with the CEO of Reliance, get the whole friends with celebrities thing over with and ask him to invest a few million to repave the roads in my town? Isn’t infrastructure their primary business anyway? Or at least let Reliance invest in the next Dan Brown movie so they can make their money back and keep funding movies, instead of squandering their investment so only you make money, and you can have an excuse to say Facebook and Twitter when you have your bi-monthly dinner at Ago with your kids.