The streamer hopes that by turning adaptations of the R.L. Stine series into weekly film events, audiences will stay glued to the screen.
It’s crunchtime for Leigh Janiak. The writer-director is less than two months away from her Netflix debut, and she’s mixing sound and reviewing special effects with a clock ticking in the background. Only her process is moving at a much more harried pace than usual, since Janiak, as the director of the “Fear Street” trilogy, is trying to finish three movies at once. When she does, she and her producers at Chernin Entertainment will try an experiment with Netflix: For the first time, the streamer will release a movie weekly three Fridays in a row, beginning July 2. Think bingeing for movie lovers. “It’s kind of a hybrid. It’s kind of a new thing,” Janiak said. “It’s a mix between a traditional movie and what would be considered traditional TV: Each installment, each part, tells its own story but it’s also very connected to the next piece. That is a very exciting thing for me as a filmmaker.” It’s also quite ambitious. The three movies, based on R.L. Stine books, span some 300 years and star a who’s who of today’s brightest young talent: Sadie Sink from “Stranger Things,” Keira Madeira from “Trinkets” and Chiara Aurelia from “Cruel Summer.” All three films, budgeted around $20 million each, connect around a 300-year-old incident that’s been terrorizing the fictional Shadyside, Ohio for generations. The first film takes place in 1994 and is heavy on mall culture and early AOL chats while paying homage to the “Scream” movies and “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” The second film is set at a summer camp in the year 1978 — think short shorts and color wars — and references both “Friday the 13th” and “Halloween.” Janiak said her shooting style for the third film, set in 1666, was inspired by Terrence Malick’s “ The New World .” Netflix introduced television bingein g in 2013 when it dropped the entire season of “House of Cards” at once. This weekly experiment represents a similar approach, one that, if it works, could make movies as sticky and as valuable as the television series the streamer is known for. A weekly schedule “is the sweet spot where it gives enough space and time for each of the films to stand independently on their own,” said Lisa Nishimura, Netflix’s vice president of independent film and documentary features.
