Here’s big and exciting news from the OTT industry. PeepingMoon.com has exclusively learned that filmmaker Zoya Akhtar, who did the Netflix anthology Ghost Stories last year, is right now working on another big series for the web streaming giant. This, in addition to Zoya currently shooting for Amazon Prime Video’s romantic drama Made in Heaven that premiered in March 2019 and fetched lead actor Arjun Mathur an International Emmy Awards nomination.
PeepingMoon.com has learned that Zoya is going to be doing the Hindi adaptation of American popular teenage comic character Archie for Netflix. And she’s busy screen testing young Bollywood talent and newbies to play the roles of Archie and his gang of friends Reggie, Jughead, Betty, Veronica, Moose, Midge, Dilton, Big Ethel, Mr. Lodge, Miss Grundy, Pop Tate, Mr. Weatherbee, Smithers the butler, Stevens the janitor, and other fictional characters of Riverdale High School.
Archie would be 81 today, the first comic came out in 1939, but for diehard fans Archie remains the freckle-faced, red-headed teenage heartthrob of the American campus scene they fell in love with when they were young. Archie comics are packed with stories of hilarity, hijinks, romance and fun. They would lend most brilliantly to a web series. And Zoya, whose casting of Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt in the musical Gully Boy in 2019 is still talked about, has a challenging task finding actors to fit the comic’s characters.
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Of interest to Bollywood fans and readers of Archie would be the names of those actors going to play the roles of the four top comic book characters – Archie, Reggie, Veronica and Betty. Their high school romance sizzles with chemistry. In terms of popularity, this gang of Riverdale High School is as big and famous as the
Marvel Comics superheroes Spider-Man, the Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Ant-Man and the Avengers, X-Men, Fantastic Four and Guardians of the Galaxy. You may try and guess the identities of the cast.
Incidentally, Archie has already been brought to life in a successful American teenage drama series titled Riverdale. It is based on the same characters of the popular comic book series and premiered in 2017. It is popularly running for the fifth consecutive season. Netflix acquired the rights and is currently its worldwide broadcaster. If Zoya is adapting this show… then with it web films are about to go through the roof!
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