With Disney+ firmly launched (95 million subscribers and growing), the studio has announced its first slate of European projects, including one intriguing-sounding series, Parallels, described as a “six-part fantasy adventure series, which follows four teenagers whose lives are turned upside down when a mysterious event propels them into parallel dimensions.”
Acquiring foreign projects are often a key bit of strategy for most streaming services: Netflix has found critical success with projects like Dark (from Germany), Cable Girls (from Spain), The Wandering Earth (from China), and most recently, Space Sweepers (from Korea). As each streaming service looks to grow their audiences beyond consumers in the United States, these projects help attract those audiences, and provides new content for their international subscribers.
Disney’s announcement includes projects for both Disney+ and its Star app (a catalog of programming designed for adult audiences) from France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, and spans genres. There’s Parallels, as well as true crime (Oussekine, France), comedy (Weekend Family, France), crime thriller (The Good Mothers, Italy), romance (The Ignorant Angels, Italy), and sports (Feyenoord Rotterdam, Netherlands).
Of those, Parallels is of most interest to genre fans: it follow four teenagers who have to contend with an experiment gone wrong at the Large Hadron Collider, which upends time and space, according to Deadline:
During a split second, the Universe abolishes its rules: time, space and multiverses all get jumbled together. The teenagers will do everything in their power to try to fathom out what happened and turn the clocks back. The mysterious event propels the group of 14-year olds into parallel dimensions, leaving them racing to return home before their futures are altered forever.
The series is currently in production, although there isn’t a release date for the project just yet.
