Scarlett Johansson is getting into the reality television business.
The Black Widow star is exec producing Assassins, a new series greenlight at Peacock.
The series comes from Sony’s B17 Entertainment and founders Brien Meagher and Rhett Bachner are exec producing alongside Johansson.
Assassins follows a group of players competing in a game of strategy and wit inspired by the live-action game played in real life around the world. From the moment they arrive, each player is assigned a target — one person they must eliminate before the season is out. But in this game, every hunter is also the hunted, and no one is ever safe. With shifting alliances and deception, only the most calculating player will survive to win it all, per the logline.
The game, which is popular on college campuses, is essentially a version of tag, which itself was turned into The Ultimate Tag for Fox in 2020.
It is the latest competition series based on a real-life game and follows, most notably, Peacock’s own series The Traitors, which is loosely based on Mafia. NBC is currently airing The Traitors: New Blood with Peacock airing season six of the celebrity edition next year.
There have been a number of competition series where contestants are hunted; CBS aired Hunted, based on Channel 4’s British series, for one season in 2017, while The Runner, which came from Pilgrim Media Group and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, launched on go90 in 2016.
It’s not clear how Johansson got involved in Assassins, but she becomes the latest A-list star to exec produce a reality competition, joining the likes of Brad Pitt, who exec produces Fox’s Lego Masters.
B17 Entertainment is behind series including Fox’s Extraction, ABC’s The Final Straw and Roku’s Thanks A Million.