'The Scary City' Scares Up $5.2M ($14K/min?), Prepares for Sept. 15th Debut

If you thought the finale of lonelygirl15 was the last we would hear of the show, you’d be wrong. A selection of upcoming online projects by lg15 alumni includes Jessica Rose’s leading role in the new show Sorority Forever this fall, writer Mary Feuer’s new Strike.TV show With the Angels, and now executive producer Yumiko Aoyagi has announced that her latest project, a thriller entitled The Scary City, will be released on September 15th.

If there are two terms that could describe the buzz around The Scary City, those terms would be ‘big budget’ and ‘multimedia extravaganza.’ The project has $5.2 million in funding, including a $1.4 million website that will include character blogs, games, and merchandise. Let’s do a little math here – with $3.8 million left for programming, and assuming that the series will have about 180 episodes (similar to one season of lg15) The Scary City will cost about $21,111 per episode. With episodes between 1.5 and 3 minutes long, this comes out to anywhere from $7,037 and $14,074 per minute. [To compare, Prom Queen cost Michael Eisner’s Vuguru about $2,000 per minute, and low-budget hit Break a Leg spends about $63 per minute.]

Produced by BS-i, a Japanese satellite broadcaster that serves as both a creator of original content, and distributor for Japanese and American shows (such as Lost) in Japan, the series will be released online as well as on mobile phones and in a graphic-novel format. The plan is to develop the story into a feature length movie; Aoyagi explained, “It’s like a full-fledged pre-release campaign, with each story in every country serving as a trailer for the movie.”

The series will also be spread out globally – the first versions to be released will be American and Japanese storylines, and future stories in development will take place in Israel, France, the UK, Thailand, and Korea. Aoyagi has been fairly busy this year – on top of The Scary City and the lg15 finale, she is also an executive producer for the upcoming film See Dick Run. Her past credits include writing for the Japanese drama/thriller “Sing Yuet Tung Wa,” also know as “Moonlight Express,” as well as writing for a few Japanese TV mini-series.

Photo by Span X