Russell Sanzgiri’s Counterpart Pictures has optioned the film rights to Tapas Media’s digital comic book “Blink,” Variety has learned exclusively.
The comic, written by former DC Comics editor Rex Ogle and drawn by Eduardo Francisco, focuses on a young African-American girl pushed to the brink — until she screams at the top of her lungs, seemingly causing anything and everything to freeze indefinitely. Alone and afraid, she wanders around New York City while being stalked by an ancient evil entity.
Sanzgiri will executive produce. His credits include Netflix’s “Michael Bolton’s Big, Sexy Valentine’s Day Special” and the Fullscreen series “Guilty Party: History of Lying.” Sanzgiri broke into the business assisting on Spike Jonze’s short films, such as “I’m Here,” starring Andrew Garfield, and “We Were Once a Fairytale,” with Kanye West. Most recently, Sanzgiri served as an executive producer on the documentary “Changing the Game,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and won the audience award for best documentary feature at Outfest.
Tapas Media has 70,000 original titles published to date, with one million unique episodes and over 5 billion views. Tapas recently announced Dante Basco is optioning one of its webcomics “Kids Being Kids” and signed an exclusive deal to publish “Love in Time” from creator-writers Ki Hong Lee, Chris Dinh and James Chen.
“Comics have always been a great source of original stories for film and TV, and we’re excited to help creators like Rex and Eduardo publish new and captivating stories like ‘Blink’ on Tapas,” Tapas Media CEO Chang Kim said. “To further help develop these stories and pitch to studios and production companies for ancillary development opportunities has been an incredibly exciting endeavor.”