And get this comic fans, Ninjak will be played by the very same badass who played Deadshot on CW’s Arrow, Michael Rowe. In addition, the series will also feature Jason David Frank (Power Rangers) Kevin Porter (Dodgeball), actress/model Ciera Foster (Two and a Half Men), John Morrison (WWE, El Rey’s Lucha Underground), Derek Theler (ABC’s Baby Daddy), and Chantelle Barry (90210, Entourage) and will be directed by “Aaron and Sean Schoenke, co-founders of Bat in the Sun Productions, which is well-known for the immensely popular Super Power Beat Down Videos that have accrued more than 18 million views on YouTube.” “This new series will be launched under a new division called Valiant Digital. With Ninjak Vs The Valiant Universe as the first of several new series under this division, Valiant Digital will expose Valiant’s characters to new audiences with live action, animation, and beyond.” Watch the teaser here: Man, does all this sound ambitious or whatAt New York Comic Con we sat down with Valiant’s CEO & Chief Creative Officer Dinesh Shamdasani to get the details on this series and also find out what is going on with the announced slate of Valiant films as well as the philosophy behind the company’s growing success. Shamdasani: It’s a live action show, obviously. We’re going to touch a number of corners of the universe. The basic premise is that Ninjak…is in opposition to many of his allies he has been aligned with the in the Valiant Universe. Now, he finds himself up against them one on one. It’s going to be a lot of fun. As for the Cinematic Universe, we’re looking to make Ninjak Vs The Valiant Universe everything it can be. On the cinematic side, we’re focusing on making that everything it can be. We’re not shutting any doors, we’re leaving them open, but we don’t want to approach it the way some others have approached it. It’s hard enough to make things good. We’re focusing on each story and build out from that. That’s what the new Valiant has done so well, it started so small and when you had that initial success, you didn’t try and make hundreds of new titles. How did this new live action project come about? Yeah, I got into superheroes because of Super Friends. Exactly, I got in because of X-Men Adventures, and then the movies and then I’m reading comics. There was a direct trajectory between Batman: The Animated Series and the X-Men animated show to reading comic books. Today, Saturday morning cartoons still exist but they’re consumed in a different by the demographic in a different way…the demographic is online. About two years ago, we became very aggressive and researched that space. Every other company was running away from it but we made our plan to become a first mover. We are building something that I feel has the most ambition than anything that has been done in this space. How will Ninjak Vs The Valiant Universe be delivered to fans? Do you have network or streaming partner? We haven’t announced or decided who our distribution partner will be. Our number one goal is to get many people to see it. We have the benefit of not worrying about it right now. We only have the cooks in the kitchen that are necessary. So why start off with Ninjak? There’s so much super hero content, if the TV and the films move forward for Valiant, you’re going to be the fourth. There’s Marvel, there’s Fox Marvel, and there’s DC. I don’t believe in superhero fatigue, but you can you address it and are you concerned by it? I don’t believe in superhero fatigue. This is something that Jim Shooter walked us though when he worked for us, because the same question came up for decades. You would see an increase in superhero sales and a decrease in superhero sales. Jim would tell us that since he started in the superhero business when he was 13 years old people thought that superhero comics were going to die. He found that when books were good, they would grow. When people started talking about fatigue, things were bad. We’re lucky that right now, Marvel is killing it. Fox is killing it with X-Men. DC has potential on the horizon, I’m not a fan of what they’ve put out other than the first two Nolan films. TV, they’re killing it. The great thing about Valiant is that you have multiple genres. Ninjak is espionage. X-O Manowar has a toe in Game of Thrones, Harbinger is almost like a CW teen drama… 100%. All of our films are not built as super hero films, they’re built out of different genres with superheroes in the middle of it. Our books work that way too. Bat in the Sun? They’re incredibly prolific, talented filmmakers that work on a show called Super Power Beat Down that’s incredibly powerful. They create live action versions of characters and have fans vote on who’d win. What’s amazing about them, they do a tremendous job with the costuming, they do a tremendous job with fights, they do a tremendous job with bringing their characterization out through the fighting. We wanted them to build the next level of that. We wanted them to bring narrative storytelling, an amalgamation of our narrative storytelling approach to their fighting, costumes, and style. How long is each episode? So every episode you have Ninjak versus a Valiant character… No, at the beginning, we hoped that would be the assumption, because that’s what Super Power Beat Down is. We wanted something that started there but evolved into something much more exciting. I will tell you. John Morrison is playing Eternal Warrior. But I won’t tell you who’s playing Quantum and Woody. That’s my favorite bit of casting. Will we have goat? Can you talk about the next few years at Valiant? Is there a film schedule? There’s no film schedule and here’s why. Again, everything comes back to our approach to publishing. We may never do a movie, if they’re all terrible. Our approach is not to rush it. We don’t really care when they come out, we care that they’re good. It’s the same thing on the film side, the movies may not come out as quickly as we want them to, but I can guarantee that when they do come out, they will be fantastic. Due to the fragmentary nature of the way people watch genre media, how are you going to grab attention? What would your Valiant dream be? If you can take any character on any platform with an unlimited budget, what would it be? It’s evolving. It’s an evolving horizon. If you asked me five years ago, I’d say Cary Nord’s X-O Manowar. If you asked me today, I’d say Josh Dysart’s Harbinger. But, the thing I’m so excited about going forward, is that X-O just hit issue 50. I didn’t even know we’d get there, but now that we have we are, we are ready to lay the foundation for what X-O Manowar is, the full potential. We couldn’t get there, we couldn’t go cosmic with X-O until we laid the foundation. Now, the next series will be the best thing we’ve done.
