What do you get when you put the son of a major Hollywood mogul, his daddy’s money, and the author of a quirky bestseller in a room together? If you guessed KatzSmith Productions, you’re far better at this game than me.
Founded by David Katzen (28-year-old son of Jeffrey Katzen) and novelist Seth Grahame-Smith (“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”), the upstart studio is set up at Warner Bros. and will specialize in producing genre mash-ups. Most interesting on their list? An X-Men meets The Breakfast Club hybrid series.
Explains Grahame-Smith:
A group of kids gets detention on the same day. They have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It’s the goth, it’s the jock, it’s the this, it’s the that …
They’re in a chem lab for detention, and, in a very comic book, origin-story kind of way, something goes wrong in the lab and they all get different super powers.
All the sudden this group of total non-friends has to become a poor man’s X-Men, figure out what their powers are, and fight a growing crime menace we reveal in a Buffy-type way.
If this project, entitled ” Extra Curricular” takes a dark Chronicle type approach instead of a CW teen soap angle, I’m all in. I’d love to see what the nerd and the goth would do, and watch the John Bender-inspired rebel not get the horns for once.
KatzSmith Productions are also looking to produce Unholy Night, an action oriented retelling of The Three Wise Men Christmas story based on Grahame-Smith’s upcoming novel, and a 26-years-later Beetlejuice sequel with Michael Keaton reprising his role as the titular spook.
To read more about what the mash-up men have in store, go to EW.