One of our fine, entertainment journals thinks so ...
Netflix has secured the rights to Jeff Smith’s Bone, the whimsical fantasy epic that’s widely viewed as one of the Holy Grail properties among unadapted comic book classics. Netflix will develop the Bone shelf of international bestsellers as an animated kids series.
The writer, artist, and creator of Bone had an animated reaction to the Netflix acquisition and its ambitions.
“I’ve waited a long time for this,” Smith said. “Netflix is the perfect home for Bone. ... An animated series is exactly the way to do this! The team at Netflix understands Bone and is committed to doing something special — this is good news for kids and cartoon lovers all over the world.” ...
Put yourself in Netflix's place: you're a streaming service that needs content. Lots and lots of content. And Disney isn't available, and other cartoon catalogues are unavailable because various competitors control the rights and they wont be giving you permission to run them anymore.
So what the hell do you do?
You root around for other content. New content. And Warners has held this comic book epic about the Bone cousins and they haven't done squat with it. So you wheel, coax and pry the franchise away from them, and develop it yourself.
Because you need hours and hours of entertainment, family entertainment. And you are willing to pay to get it. My guess? Netflix will find a way to get Bone into brisk development, and get it to viewers. They're in a fight for eager, youthful eyeballs with Disney, Universal and others. And they intend (obviously) to stay in the game.
I discovered the Bone series not very long ago and saw they have potential in telling stories in animation. It that seems Netflix continues to be the only place where creators and animators can tell stories the way THEY want to tell them without executive meddling.
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