Here’s good news for anybody who’s not already sick of keeping track of what’s moving on and off of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Crackle, Seeso, and HBO Go: Blackpills is on its way. What is Blackpills? Well, in case its pulsing, Gabbo-esque launch site didn’t make it clear, it’s a new French streaming service that’s been quietly snapping up web series and TV shows over the last few months, in the hopes of creating “scripted content for millennials to be consumed on mobile devices.” (It’s also what you take to get to the best all-leather kung-fu dancing fuck clubs in The Matrix, or so we heard.)
From its Facebook page, the service seems like it might be launching its “new addiction” tomorrow. But it already made waves earlier today, with Deadline reporting that a “micro-episodic TV show” based off of Harmony Korine’s sensory overload Spring Breakers is in the works. Korine’s not involved, but producers Chris Hanley and Fernando Sulichin are both onboard to serve up the DayGlo madness and bikini-assisted bank robberies that America’s content-starved masses demand.
But Spring Breakers won’t be the only junk food Blackpills pours into the already overstuffed digital trough; the company has been teasing several of its new shows via some truly special Twitter posters, including Sundance episodic entrant Pineapple, Luc Besson’s Playground, and a show about a man with a stinky, bad-tasting dick:
At the end, they will be killers or they will be dead.
Playground, created by @lucbesson, available soon. pic.twitter.com/T1OCp7aCFT— blackpills (@blackpills) March 1, 2017
Fantasy is the best way to become a superhero, doesn’t matter if you’re completely nuts.
Maniac, soon on blackpills. pic.twitter.com/tcMmHjgtde— blackpills (@blackpills) March 9, 2017
Beyond the sheer number of bewildered dudes staring into the camera, wondering how in the hell they ended up in French streaming purgatory, the release strategy here is a little wonky. At least some of these projects, including Game Of Death, have already made the festival rounds as actual films. It’s not clear if Blackpills is just going to chop them up and serve them in blipvert bursts to their savvy technomancer audiences, or whether they’ll pursue some other, less Max Headroom-heavy digital policy to get its stuff in people’s brains.