Robert Kirkman, the creator of the hit series "The Walking Dead," is producing a potential YouTube Red flagship show starring YouTube star PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg) entitled "Scare PewDiePie," The Verge reported.
Skybound Entertainment, Kirkman's company, will be producing the show in a bid to help YouTube "become the home premium content it so clearly wants to be." As to how Kirkman plans to market "Scare PewDiePie," he said the key factor is "holding onto the exuberance and charisma that have made the YouTube star so successful in the first place.
"To be reductionist, he's become famous by playing video games and getting scared. So what if we make those games real," said David Alpert, Kirkman's producing partner in Skybound Entertainment. According to The Verge, "Scare PewDiePie" will put the YouTube star in physically recreated scary games. The YouTube Red flagship show is more of a reality prank show that features horror and video games.
"How freaked out, how creeped out, how scared can we make him? It was our goal to turn a human being into a pile of quivering jelly for our amusement," Alpert added.
"It's like a play within a play, where he [PewDiePie] thinks, 'Okay that was production meeting.' Great. Now we have the [real] production meeting. So the guy that Mr. Pie thought was the director actually wasn't the director, and we only told him that at the very end of the shoot," he said further.
With a narrative built around a single person, Kirkman said that "Scare PewDiePie" is fairly unique.
PewDiePie recently (via Billboard) expressed his support for YouTube Red, which he calls a response from Google to ad blockers. He even extended to his wide fan base and asked them to sign up for the site's monthly subscription service. With the rising popularity of ad blocker apps, PewDiePie said that YouTubers like him lose about 40 percent of their ad income.
"Using Adblock doesn't mean you're clever and above the system," he said. "YouTube Red exists because using Adblock has actual consequences."
