Killed Maika Monroe Series Revived And Recut Into Movie

The Stranger, written by Veena Sud, follows the story of a rideshare driver, Claire—portrayed by Maika Monro. She picks up Carl, a passenger from hell who thrusts Claire into a 12-hour fight for survival through the city’s seedy underbelly.

However, Claire is not easy prey. Following Quibi’s dissolution, the series is being compiled as a feature film, scheduled to be released on the Hulu streaming service on April 15, 2024.

This is a rather interesting turn of events. Maika Monroe’s The Stranger, owned by a streaming service, is being recut and re-released as a film after its original streaming service dies while still clutching onto the copyrights.

However, there is more to this story than meets the legal eye, especially since Quibi allowed artists to co-own the copyrights to their work.

So, despite its relatively short life on the market, Quibi turned out to be a service with its eyes set on the future—a future that other streamers tried to dispute during Hollywood’s most recent labor clash.

Quibi, the service that originally hosted Maika Monroe’s The Stranger, was a rather interesting project. It stemmed from a bunch of wealthy entertainment executives who wondered how it would look like if people consumed movies and TV in short format, similar to reels and shorts on social media.

So, they poured their funds into their idea, giving birth to a free-to-use platform that offered unique content in a short video format—unfortunately, the project wasn’t really viable from a financial perspective, and Quibi was quickly shut down.

It was a rather good idea on paper, but it was never meant to work in practice. Fortunately, since the creators co-owned their work and shared rights with the now-defunct platform, they also hold distribution rights, saving a massive chunk of Quibi’s content from oblivion.

Many releases have found their homes elsewhere; The Most Dangerous Game moved to Roku, and Maika Monroe’s The Stranger, which went unseen by most, is now being compiled into a feature-length movie for Hulu—this might imply coming to Disney+, as well.

Quibi’s approach with Maika Monroe’s The Stranger and other works produced by other artists and filmmakers saved the content from being forgotten.

We can say that by trying to entice artists into producing content for their platform through promises of copyright ownership, Quibi inadvertently positioned itself as a champion of media preservation efforts.

All of that was before the company was killed off by its investors and before media giants such as Sony and Disney announced their distancing from physical copies and media preservation. But The Stranger could live on here, which would be a win all around.

Source: Bloody Disgusting