Why The Weinstein Company Picked Up ‘The Haunting Of Sunshine Girl’ Series For Books And TV

By 10/23/2015
Why The Weinstein Company Picked Up ‘The Haunting Of Sunshine Girl’ Series For Books And TV

Back in May 2014, entertainment company and film studio The Weinstein Company, along with its book publishing division Weinstein Books, announced it would turn the YouTube channel and web series The Haunting of Sunshine Girl into the formats of book and television, the former of which is already well underway. The first publication of a planned trilogy, written by Sunshine Girl star Paige McKenzie along with Alyssa Sheinmel, was released on March 24, 2015, by Weinstein Books, the book publishing division of the larger entertainment brand.

So, how did a YouTube channel with a few hundred thousand subscribers get involved with one of the best-known entertainment entities in Hollywood and end up on bookshelves? According to Georgina Levitt, Publishing Director at Weinstein Books, her company knew exactly what it was looking at when a literary agent originally pitched a book series based on The Haunting of Sunshine Girl. Being a part of a larger multi-media company means Weinstein Books is often well-aware of popular content and trends in spaces beyond traditional publishing, like online video and blogs.  

“We were familiar with the Haunting of Sunshine Girl YouTube channel and the success it had had,” Levitt explained in an interview with Tubefilter, referencing the web series’ more than 124 million total views to date. “We were very impressed with the author, and all the creators, and their social media platforms, and the way they marketed and promoted their content.”

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Levitt explained how The Weinstein Company considers books “an important” component of its business. Published works are often the source of film or television programming and can lay the foundation for a very successful franchise in a number of mediums.  Levitt noted the content for The Haunting of Sunshine Girl book series was especially strong, giving credit to McKenzie and the other Sunshine Girl creators Nick Hagen and Mercedes Rose, who were all involved “100%, every step of the way” with the book, its development, and its marketing.

Weinstein Books started to work on The Haunting of Sunshine Girl series just ahead of the wave of YouTubers looking to become authors. “This was slightly before the onslaught of a lot of YouTubers moving into the book space,” Levitt explained. “We thought it was an amazing opportunity, and it was unique at the time that a work of fiction would be inspired by a YouTube channel,” as opposed to the memoires and how-to publications we’ve seen from a lot of other prominent online video personalities. 

“To have this YouTube channel that was then going to be a fictional, young adult series of paranormal books was rare, unique, and sort of unheard of at the time. For us, it really stood out as being special,” Levitt explained. The publishing director said it was an easy decision to purchase publishing rights, and also get Weinstein Company owners and brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein on board with a television adaptation. The move was the first time both the Weinstein book and film branches had simultaneously picked up a title for new projects in their respective departments.

In terms of the content in the The Haunting of Sunshine Girl book series, Levitt believes the story is creative and broad enough to attract new readers while also satisfying pre-existing fans of the web series. “It takes the basic concept of a mother and her daughter living in a haunted house and really expands it from there,” Levitt explained. “It takes it into a whole paranormal world and universe with a lot of layered mythology.” Readers are introduced to 16-year-old Sunshine Griffith and follow her story as she finds out she is a member of an ancient super-human race and starts to figure out what that means for the future of the humanity. The book can, according to Levitt, “stand on its own” for those unfamiliar with the web series, but Sunshine Girl will also provide “really interesting twists and turns” with the characters, setting, and story previous fans have come to know and love.

Levitt will be hosting a panel at Stream Con NYC on October 30 to discuss more about Weinstein’s acquisition and development of The Haunting of the Sunshine Girl book series. You can purchase tickets to the event here. The second The Haunting of Sunshine Girl book, called The Awakening of Sunshine Girl, is due out in March 2016.

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