J.J. Abrams to produce Justice League Dark, Shining spinoff series for HBO Max

Last September, WarnerMedia closed an enormous deal with producer-writer-director J.J. Abrams and his company Bad Robot to produce television shows, movies, and more for the conglomerate. With WarnerMedia’s Netflix competitor HBO Max on the horizon, the deal was a coup, ensuring that Abrams, no stranger to IP rebooting, could both spin up original content and take on major properties for the streaming service. Now we’re getting the first taste of that deal.

HBO Max today announced on Thursday that Abrams and Katie McGrath’s Bad Robot Productions and Warner Bros. Television Group would produce three new series for the streamer, one of them culling from DC Comics’ untapped library of characters.

The first is an original, called Duster, co-written by J.J. Abrams and LaToya Morgan (The Walking Dead). According to a news release, the series is set in the 1970s Southwest, and tracks the life of a “gutsy getaway driver for a growing crime syndicate [that] goes from awful to wildly, stupidly, dangerously awful.”

The second series, Overlook, is “a horror-thriller series inspired by and featuring iconic characters from Stephen King’s masterpiece The Shining.” The show will explore the “untold, terrifying stories of the most famous haunted hotel in American fiction,” which sounds like an anthology in the making. This marks Abrams’ second collaboration with Stephen King after Hulu’s Castle Rock.

The third is a huge coup for the DC Entertainment brand. The new series will focus on the DC characters in the “Justice League Dark” Universe, a group that typically includes John Constantine, Swamp Thing, Deadman, Zatanna, and Etrigan, a demon imprisoned in the body of the medieval knight. Everyone from Doug Liman to Guillermo del Toro have flirted with a movie adaptation over the years, but now it’s going to series under Abrams’ supervision. WarnerMedia expects more details to be revealed soon.

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