Sin City TV Series Being Developed at The Weinstein Company


Veteran producer Harvey Weinstein, whose last attempt to move into television in a big way was Miramax TV brand that brought series like the Clerks cartoon and Project Runway to the airwaves, wants to diversify The Weinstein Company's offerings by moving in on the small screen--and he wants Frank Miller's Sin City to help him.

The New York Times (via CBM) is reporting that Weinstein hopes "to quickly follow the August release of the film Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, with a Sin City television series from Mr. Miller and Mr. Rodriguez."

That would be a hard shift for the franchise: not only would it be virtually impossible for Miller and Rodriguez to stay involved in every shot of a potential TV series, but the needs of ongoing, weekly storytelling would mean that it couldn't be quite so direct an adaptation of the comic books as the first film was and the second film is said to be. Most networks would also demand the series be toned down...and of course the battery of big-name movie stars that make brief appearances in the movies wouldn't be likely to do so on television.

Weinstein believes that the move to television is the missing piece for the company he and his brother run, and there may be something to that. The difference between features films (which cost a lot and then deliever a big, one-time return on investment) and an ongoing TV series (which delivers revenue 10 or more times per year in smaller increments but probably costs about the same for a full season as a single high-quality feature in many cases) is significant, and it's no secret in Hollywood that TV is where a lot of the money is. The question would be whether Weinstein would pursue traditional broadcast and cable networks, as he's done in the past with varied success, or bring such a project to Netflix, Amazon or Hulu.