Machinima Taps Justin Lin for New KNIGHT RIDER

Digital network Machinima has announced that Justin Lin will helm an online reboot of Knight Rider.

Machinima is partnering with Lin’s YOMYOMF and NBCUniversal Brand Development for the new series, which will run on the web starting in 2017. It follows in the footsteps of other online franchise outings such as Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome (which was originally supposed to air on Syfy until the network changed their release strategy), Mortal Kombat: Legacy and others.

“Knight Rider is an iconic franchise whose concepts of AI and autonomous vehicles were science fiction in the 1980s and are now science fact,” Machinima CEO Chad Gutstein said. “Justin is one of the leading storytellers of his generation and we couldn’t be more excited to work with him on re-invigorating Knight Rider for a new generation of fans.”

Details are sparse, and it’s not clear if this is a full-on reboot or a “requel” similar to NBC’s Knight Rider in 2008, which starred Justin Bruening as the second generation Michael Knight. That series only lasted seventeen episodes.

The original Knight Rider, created by Glen A. Larson, ran on NBC from 1982 to 1986 and propelled David Hasselhoff to stardom, boosted further by his role on Baywatch, and the show spawned numerous spinoffs and attempts at sequels: Knight Rider 2000 was a TV movie that reunited Hasselhoff with William Daniels as the voice of KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand), and Team Knight Rider followed a new team in a fleet of AI-enhanced vehicles in adventures that lasted for twenty-two episodes. (TKR also has the distinction of including our friend Tom Kane in the cast. Before voicing Yoda in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, he was Dante in this show.)

There was even a post-apocalyptic version with Knight Rider 2010.

Likely this new project is not the Knight Rider Heroes project that teased something in development last year with this video:

More details as they come available.