Who Wants to be a Syfy Filmmaker?
Syfy has held two contests in the past letting viewers select the title for one of their original movies only for the winning selections to sound so unimaginative you couldn’t believe Syfy needed viewer input to come up with it. Now they’re offering fans the chance to actually help create the movie itself, and I just have this inkling the end result is going to be the same.
Somehow I knew this day would come. I’ll let The Hollywood Reporter explain this brilliantly hairbrained idea Syfy has come up with:
Syfy is giving online fans a chance to write and design every aspect of an upcoming Saturday night creature feature.
The network is launching a production site, B Movie Mogul, where fans can vote and pitch ideas for the film, from title, creatures, wardrobe, dialogue and character deaths to promotional taglines. The resulting “script” will be shot as a two-hour Syfy original movie to be released next year.
“We constantly have fans e-mailing with compliments, complaints and questions about our movies, and this is a way of involving the fans in a new way,” said Thomas Vitale, executive vp programming and original movies. “This is where entertainment is going and just the start of many more things of this nature for Syfy.”
Syfy is teaming with entertainment site IGN on the site; the partnership will last 15 months and launch Friday. The first stage will have fans voting on one of three overall concepts for the movie: a 2010 apocalypse story, a Bermuda Triangle-set creature feature or a Roswell, N.M.-set alien movie. But the venture raises the question: What if fans create a lousy movie?
“When you have a lot of people working on something, good ideas will come out of it,” Vitale said. “We will have something that will be entertaining.”
The ultimate movie by committee – I see this as something that could be potentially fun to take part in and a total recipe for disaster.
What if fans create a lousy movie?
Okay, everyone, in the spirit of this Syfy venture, let’s all play along and post our own smartass response to that particular question. I’ll go first.
How could you tell the difference?
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