It launches Monday in the U.S. and Canada
with a 90-day free trial and 50 programs, all
in segments no longer than 10 minutes.
They include “Punk’d,” with Chance the
Rapper as host and executive producer; the
Hemsworth-Waltz movie “Most Dangerous
Game,” and “Chrissy’s Court,” with Chrissy
Teigen administering justice in small claims
cases a la Judge Judy.
Others who have signed on to either produce
or appear (or both) in Quibi content include
Reese Witherspoon, Joe Jonas, Jennifer Lopez,
Lena Waithe and Sophie Turner.
But the biggest names attached to the project
are its executives: entertainment industry
heavyweight Jeffrey Katzenberg and former
Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman. In the
1980s, Katzenberg revived the Walt Disney
Co.’s movie studio and its animation division
with hits including “The Little Mermaid,” and
in 1994 co-founded DreamWorks SGK with
Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. Quibi
is Katzenberg’s brainchild, and he picked
Whitman, also a onetime Disney executive,
as the new platform’s CEO.
For Katzenberg, it’s the product that will
make Quibi a winner.
“In all my years, there is one rule that has never
failed, ever,” he said. “Which is, when I had my
hands on great content, whether it was an
animation and movies, .... whether it was TV
shows, a Broadway show, a novel, anything
that I had ever had in my orbit that was really
good, it’s never not worked.”