Steven Spielberg will return to the horror genre in 2020. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Oscar-winning director has signed on for an experimental series to run on Jeffrey Katzenberg’s new digital-content startup, Quibi.
“Steven Spielberg came in and said, ‘I have a super scary story’,” Katzenberg announced on Sunday. “But he said, ‘I only want people to watch it at midnight. It’s a creepy idea and when they watch it, I want it to be creepier.’”
Said creepy idea is Spielberg After Dark, which the auteur wants sliced up into 12 to 14 short videos. Katzenberg stressed that his team also devised a way to stream the content so that it only appears after sunset using a user’s geographical location.
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It’s a very hip idea and yet Spielberg is just one of many A-list creators tied to Quibi. The company plans to edit two to four-hour series into bite-sized segments no more than seven to 10 minutes each.
Katzenberg founded Quibi with former HP CEO Meg Whitman. Together, they plan to spend around $1 billion on content in its first year with another $470 million reserved for marketing and promotion. The service is set to debut on April 6, 2020 in North America
Currently, Spielberg is hard at work on his (unnecessary) remake of West Side Story and allegedly a fifth Indiana Jones adventure. Horror hounds, however, will no doubt be stoked to see him return to the genre.
Or rather, the darkness.