Ben Stiller to Create ‘Zoolander’ Web Series

The only reason Zoolander isn’t the top grossing movie of all-time is because it made its theatrical debut September 28, 2001 and 17 days earlier was September 11, 2001.

No one was in the mood to go to a theatre and see Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson play hyperbolic male models battling crazed designers in a candy-colored, industrial fashion world dominated by Tyson Beckford and Billy Zane. America was still recovering. We weren’t ready to laugh.

And with mediocre box office receipts, Paramount Pictures wasn’t ready to greenlight any future Zoolander productions. At least until now. Thanks to a loyal cult following and the general movie going public’s nostalgia for a time when it didn’t realize Will Ferrell didn’t know he could turn down movie roles, a Zoolander sequel is in the works. So is a Zoolander web series.

David Itzkoof at the New York Times reports Stiller will create an animated Zoolander web series for Paramount Digital Entertainment. The man with a face of blue steel hopes to bring Wilson, Ferrell, and other actors from the film on board to voice their animated counterparts.

The program will be one of two internet entertainment properties Stiller’s Red Hour Films is developing for Paramount Digital Entertainment. The other is Billy Glimmer, a live-action comedy with a cartoonish reality. Jason Woliner is set to direct and Stiller will star as “a mid-level voice impersonator out of Las Vegas.”

Paramount will likely show the web series on “‘one of the big aggregators,’ like MSN, AOL, Yahoo! or Hulu.” It’s worth noting that The LXD, an uber-popular, dance-centric web series collaboration between Jon M. Chu, Agility Studios, and Paramount Digital, is set to release its second season on Hulu later this month.

For his article, Itzkoff asked Stiller what drew him to the web. Stiller, who’s currently directing his parents in the Yahoo web series Stiller and Meara, answered,”It’s just a way to say, ‘Hey, let’s go do a couple of little five-minute episodes’…as opposed to saying, ‘Hey, let’s pitch it to the studio and then let’s have a fight over the budget for six months.'”