by Pkmatrix » Thu May 28, 2015 9:38 am
On the ride to work this morning, my mind wandered through a forest of ideas I've been thinking on recently: reboots, the ongoing shift of money/talent from Film to Television, superhero/comic book movies, Giant Monsters, etc.
It occurred to me that the Streaming TV services (Netflix, Amazon, etc.) would actually be a great home for an American-produced Giant Monster series. While Ultraman or something like that was the obvious option, the more I thought about it the more I realized it would actually be a really interesting idea to have a pure Giant Monster series...and what better option would there be than Gamera?
Gamera is already the closest thing to a Giant Monster superhero out there, which is a good sell but so far not enough to justify a $100 Million movie from Hollywood. He's got an interesting backstory/mythology, you've got a good rogues gallery, and if we took inspiration from the Heisei films you've got a good recurring cast of characters. Plus, and this is what's selling me on the idea, if the plan is to sell it to Netflix the series can be SHORT. Instead of figuring out how to maintain good effects with decent screentime over 26 episodes like you would on a linear broadcast network like Fox or NBC, you could instead mimic the production format of Sherlock: three episodes of ~90 minutes each. That's basically the same thing as producing a trilogy of new movies, but instead of releasing them in theaters they go direct to Netflix!
What's interesting too is the budget for each 90-minute episode would be comparable, if not higher, to anything Gamera has had in the past. Netflix typically spends something like $4 Million per episode on their shows so $6 Million for what amounts to an episode-and-a-half isn't unreasonable. If Toho Kingdom is to be believed, Gamera 3 cost about $7 Million back in 1999 (I can't find what Gamera the Brave cost, but I presume it was similar), so we KNOW Gamera can be done well on this budget. (And that presumes something higher couldn't be negotiated.)
Thoughts? What do you think about this idea?