Sony Pictures Television Inks First-Look Deal for Wattpad Stories

Sony Pictures Television will comb through Wattpad’s 500 million stories for the next potential breakout entertainment property.SPT entered into a co-production deal with Wattpad for original TV programming, giving Sony a first look at new Wattpad stories. The companies plan to work together to identify and develop popular stories shared on Wattpad platform. The deal, announced Wednesday, will be overseen by Eric Lehrman, Wattpad’s head of content development and production.According to Wattpad, 70 million monthly users engage with stories across all genres — generating billions of data points daily about fan interactions. Wattpad has created what it calls Story DNA Machine Learning technology to identify new intellectual property and storytellers that have the most potential. The SPT agreement covers original stories, not fan fiction, according to Wattpad. The deal’s announcement follows news last month that Sony Pictures Television, Wattpad and Greg Silverman’s Stampede are developing “Death Is My BFF” for Syfy.  The “Death is My BFF” series, penned by Katerina E. Tonks, has more than 62 million reads to date on Wattpad. Lindsey Rosin (“Cruel Intentions”) has been tapped to adapt it for television.