Today, Netflix announced it had closed a first-look deal with Dark Horse Entertainment, publisher of the source material for the streamer's hit series The Umbrella Academy, plus Hellboy, Sin City and other popular comic-based properties. This has to come as good news for the Portland-based publisher, which received a sizable Chinese investment in October to jumpstart its media ventures. It's also an interesting move for Neflix with the anticipated withdrawal of Disney content, including the popular Marvel series Daredevil, Jessica Jones and The Punisher, as Disney plans to launch its own OTT service later this year.
According to the announcement, Dark Horse Entertainment will give Netflix a first look at its IP for both film and TV and has started exploring future projects. Dark Horse Entertainment’s Mike Richardson, Keith Goldberg and Paul Schwake signed on to produce.
“The Netflix teams are already working in deep collaboration with Dark Horse to identify projects beyond the world of traditional superheroes—branching into horror, fantasy and family entertainment—that we think our members will love,” said Cindy Holland, vice president for original content at Netflix.
“We are very excited about this new arrangement with the talented people at Netflix,” said Mike Richardson, Dark Horse Entertainment’s president and founder. “We have strong creative relationships as well as a large content library to work with and, as we have seen with our recent projects, Netflix is the perfect partner to bring our stories to fans around the world.”
That's all well and good for the new media partners, but the next question is, what kind of projects does Dark Horse have in its content library to help satisfy viewers in the wake of Disney's decampment? Dark Horse, which has been a well-regarded publisher since the 1980s, certainly has a lot of A-list work to its name. The problem is, many of the company's biggest hits have already been developed (Hellboy, Sin City, The Mask, 300, Timecop and Tank Girl) while one of its most popular current series, Black Hammer, is already under option from Legendary Pictures and another, Resident Alien, has just been ordered to series at SyFy.
Unlike DC and Marvel, Dark Horse—which has long championed creator rights in the comics industry—does not have full corporate ownership over many of its properties, although it does own some of them, including The Mask and Time Cop. Consequently, popular, long-running titles like Eric Powell's raucous monster-basher, The Goon, and Stan Sakai's beloved samurai bunny, Usagi Yojimbo, recently fled the roost when their creators opted to take them to other publishers or to self-publish.
The company is also well known for bringing manga titles from Japan to North American audiences and for outstanding comic versions of licensed IP such as Alien, Buffy, kid-oriented Walt Disney comics and others, none of which will be helpful in the context of a first-look deal
However, even with those caveats, the company's backlist includes hundreds of characters and titles that feature solid storytelling and media potential, especially in today's unpredictable environment, where even deep cuts can turn into fan-favorite series. The deal also makes Dark Horse an attractive destination for creator-owners of comic properties who aspire to bigger media platforms for their creations. With a shakeout looming for smaller and mid-tier publishers, having a relationship with Netflix strengthens the hand of Dark Horse, currently No. 4 in market share behind Marvel, DC and Image Comics.
Probably the lowest-hanging fruit for a Netflix series deal is the extended world of Mike Mignola's Hellboy, notwithstanding the recent creative and commercial disappointment of the feature film reboot. The Hellboy-adjacent series B.P.R.D. would be a natural for series TV, especially in the no-holds-barred Netflix style. There are also lots of other books in that continuity that could spin off or make for standalone series. Personally, I'd love to see long-ago Dark Horse-published, creator-owned books like Paul Chadwick's Concrete, Michel T. Gilbert's Mr. Monster or Michael Chabon's The Escapist make it to the small screen.
The bottom line for Netflix is that Dark Horse isn't quite Marvel or DC and doesn't necessarily offer the built-in fanbase that even relatively obscure titles from those publishers bring with them. But if Netflix is looking for the next Wynonna Earp, iZombie or, for that matter, Umbrella Academy—that is, quirky, well-conceived content that could find a loyal audience—this looks like a winner on both sides.
