Skybound Developing New Animation Competition Reality TV Show

The series will likely incorporate contestants from Spike & Mike's Festival of Animation.

By Russ Burlingame

Skybound, the company behind The Walking Dead and Invincible, is launching a new reality TV series hoping to find animation talent. The show will be a co-production with DIGA Studios (Million Dollar Beach House, MTV's Scream), and the hope is to find an animation superstar by going the competition-series route with it. The exact mechanics of the game (and even a final title) are not yet known. It's likely the series will tie into Spike & Mike's Festival of Animation, a festival celebrating animated shorts, which Skybound acquired last fall and plans to relaunch in the near future.

The Hollywood Reporter broke the news, and they note that this project spins out of an unscripted content division that Skybound recently launched under executive Brent Jacoby. The report indicates that Jacoby and company are hoping to use the Spike & Mike's Festival of Animation applicants -- of which there are currently over 1,000 -- to find some cast members for the reality show.

Spike & Mike's Festival of Animation is returning to this week's San Diego Comic-Con with two screenings of archival material, per THR. Skybound will of course be there, too.

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Skybound already has one successful animated project in the form of Invincible, which has won over audiences and critics with its brutal, kinetic animation, punctuated by moments of sincerity and humanity. They also worked on the 2018/2019 Spin Master animated series Super Dinosaur, although Skybound wasn't in charge of the animation process on that one.

Skybound has stayed busy; besides The Walking Dead, Invincible, and Super Dinosaur, the studio has produced numerous The Walking Dead spinoff series, the movie Renfield, and the series Outcast and PSI Cops. On the comics side, Skybound has beome a force to be reckoned with, releasing not only all of Skybound chief Robert Kirkman's comics, but numerous indie titles in the direct market; a young readers line (Skybound Comet), and most recently, a best-selling line of Hasbro tie-ins, dubbed "The Energon Universe." Under that banner, Skybound have released critically and commercially successful comics based on characters from G.I. Joe, the Transformers, and beyond.

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