When Netflix first announced that Andy and Lana Wachowski were making their first foray into television with a sci-fi series called Sense8, the company slated it for a late 2014 release.
But things moved along kind of slowly for the project, and in February we learned that it was still in its writing phase. Inside Netflix’s quarterly earnings letter to investors, the company said that the new target release date for Sense8 had been pushed back to 2015. Writer J. Michael Straczynski said that Sense8 should start filming in late June or Early July in San Francisco.
Well, it appears that they’ve hit that goal. NBC Bay Area says that the Wachowskis and company are currently in San Francisco for the first leg of filming for Sense8. After San Francisco, they’ll take their cameras to London, Berlin, Seoul, Iceland, Mexico City, Nairobi, and Mumbai. The complex tale will be told through multiple storylines in different locales, and Netflix describes it as “a gripping global tale of minds linked and souls hunted.”
The first season of Sense8 will feature 10 episodes. Apparently, the show could go on for as many as five seasons, as that’s how many were pitched to Netflix. Of course, this all depends on the show’s popularity and whether or not it can build up a significant fan base like previous Netflix originals like House of Cards and Orange Is The New Black.
“We pitched it as a five-year story. We’ve mapped out five seasons of this thing, our actor deals are being made for five seasons, five or six depending on the breaks. So we imagined this over the long, long haul. The first season is the origin story for our characters and then we kind of go from there,” said Straczynski earlier this year.
Part of the reason it took so long to get production underway has to do with the ambitious nature of the project.
“The series is contemporaneous with current events,” he explains. “It is somewhat science fiction in some respects. It concerns eight characters around the world, who are joined telepathically with each other, or empathically, and those who are after them and hunting them to try and stop this next evolution. And the cool thing is that we’re gonna shoot this in the countries that the stories are taking place,” said Straczynski.
Hence the globetrotting.
Apparently, the Wachowskis are trying to do for television what The Matrix did for film.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
