A first-look television deal is like the holy grail for a production set-up. Now Eric Heisserer and his production partner Carmen Lewis have one in place at Legendary Entertainment, and it will include an origin story for the Pacific Rim franchise.
A first-look deal is an agreement between an independent production company, such as theirs, and a television or film studio in which the potential buyer – the studio – of an in-development project gets to see it first. It could even be at the early scriptment stage. The reason why they are the holy grail is because the studio will pay a development fee to the producers just for the right to look early.
It also guarantees pitch meetings, so no more walking around Hollywood knocking on doors and trying to make meetings. The deal also mean that, if the studio passes, the producers can still shop it around. It is basically a win-win for wannabe producers.
Heisserer and Lewis are set up with one of these deals at Legendary for television projects. This is just weeks after their Chronology production house set up a similar deal for movie projects at Sony Pictures.
They have all the bases covered. Big things could be about to happen for them. Heisserer is a writer, producer, and director himself who wrote Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and Susanne Bier’s Bird Box.
Pacific Rim started with a Guillermo del Toro-directed sci-fi epic that starred Charlie Hunnam and Idris Elba. In the movies, an inter-dimensional rift at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean allows massive monsters to enter our world and go on the rampage. To fight back, humans construct giant fighting robots called Jaegers to fight back.
The 2018 sequel Pacific Rim Uprising also made a profit, even if not as well-received as the original. There was also a Netflix anime series based in the same universe.