Posted in: DC Universe, Movies, TV | Tagged: Black Lighting, cw, entertainment, fox, gifted, greg berlanti, Matt Nix, television
The Early Buzz On Black Lightning And Gifted Pilots
Pilot season is rolling along and the upfronts are only a month or so away, meaning networks will need to make some decisions pretty quickly on potential properties. Two of the shows being talked about a lot right now are the Greg Berlanti, Salim Akil and Mara Brock Akil lead Black Lightning pilot for the CW and the Matt Nix's X-Men based series for Fox currently being called Gifted.
Black Lightning was originally set up at Fox, so when the CW gave a last minute pilot order to the show in turnaround, the script got tossed out. A shorter presentation is being filmed instead of a full pilot. Which might not sound good at first, but two years ago the CW gave a series order to Berlanti with nothing more than a trailer, a concept and a cast… and now Legends of Tomorrow is heading for season three. The network has faith in Berlanti, who currently has five shows on the network with BL and Searchers in consideration this year. And being that it's a DC property is giving this series really good odds of being picked up.
As for the Matt Nix (Burn Notice) lead X-Men series… Gifted is the working title, so I wouldn't get used to it… the initial reaction is positive and there is talk of an early pick-up. So we may get news about this series before the upfronts.
Fox has been doing well with their comic adaptations of Gotham and Lucifer. The latter already being renewed and the former expected to be. Getting one of their major film franchises onto the small screen would be the next step in expanding the brand. The CW runs 10 hours of original programming a week and the bulk of that is either Berlanti or Comic related. One has to wonder what that saturation point is. Will the law of diminishing returns come into play here or will the CW come to mean Comic Watching.
[Source: Deadline]