A porn site has offered to pick up Netflix‘s slack and produce the third season of cult hit sci-fi series Sense8, which was axed to great fan outrage earlier this year.
No, they don’t want to produce it as a porn parody. xHamster wants to straight up produce a third season as the Wachowskis want to make it. In the wake of news that Lana and Lilly Wachowski were working on writing a full third season of Sense8 – despite the fact Netflix only agreed to a two-hour finale to tie up loose ends – xHamster vice president Alex Hawkins made the offer via an open letter on their site.
And, to be honest, he makes a pretty bloody compelling argument:
xHamster is currently one of the most trafficked websites on the Internet. We get more visitors daily than the New York Times, ESPN, or the Daily Mail. In short, we have the eyeballs, and the revenue. Unlike with Netflix, you wouldn’t be competing for part of our production budget – it would be yours.
We also have the disposition. We know that a series about polymorphous perversity is a hard sell for a mainstream network like Netflix. We have no such limitations, and also understand implicitly the interconnectedness of sexualities across boundaries. In short, we are a we.
It’s actually a really fascinating question, when it comes down to it. In an era where more and more large media companies are making forays into the production of original streaming content, it was probably an inevitability that porn sites were going to do it too. They generate massive revenue and – like Hawkins said – have huge inbuilt audiences.
The question is how much of that audience is keen to actually stay around and watch a one-hour sci-fi drama once they’ve successfully cranked their hogs. Now that’s a datapoint no one has really tested.
xHamster have flirted with original content in the past – via their very own reality show The Sex Factor – but original fictional content is a whole new ballpark.
It’ll be interesting to see whether Netflix and the Wachowskis even remotely entertain this offer.
