The buzziest title new to Hulu this week is probably The Stranger, a thriller starring Maika Monroe as a rideshare driver who picks up a passenger, played by Dane DeHaan, who has more sinister plans. The reason is not primarily because of the quality of the movie (though both the New York Times and Variety gave it strong reviews), but because the feature movie is the second iteration of this project from writer/director Veena Sud, having previously been a Quibi series, originally told in 10-minute episodes.
If you don't remember what Quibi is, who can blame you? The content provider created by Jeffrey Katzenberg was designed to have consumers watch series told in 10-minute episodes entirely on their phones, vertically or horizontally, primarily for people to enjoy things as they made their daily commutes. In addition to The Stranger, Quibi lined up a number of high profile projects starring the likes of Kevin Hart, Christoph Waltz, Sophie Turner and more to entice viewers.
The problem was it launched in April 2020. With the early days of the pandemic not seeing people make their usual commutes and Quibi's content not easily watchable on anything but a phone, interest in the new platform quickly faded and it was shuttered in December 2020.
Eventually, much of Quibi's content was licensed to The Roku Channel, but much of the content was forgotten. However, Sud has reworked The Stranger to give it new life and its widest audience to date. But just how did all this come about?
Sud was one of the big grabs for Quibi as it looked to fill out its slate of content. She was a Golden Globe and Emmy-nominated writer/producer for her series The Killing, which first aired on AMC before moving to Netflix. There were a couple of things that initially intrigued Sud about signing up with Quibi. As she told Variety in an interview, one was certainly the creative opportunity of crafting a satisfying story in 10-minute episodes, but the big thing was "[Katzenberg] told us we could our own work, which is never done."
What she is referring to is the copyright for The Stranger. As she details, the deal was that after two years, the copyright license for The Stranger would revert back to Sud, for her to do with what she wanted. This is unprecedented in Hollywood — Sud told multiple outlets that the deal blew her mind — but it immediately got the wheels turning in Sud's head of what she could do when she regained full control of the project. Right up there was recutting it as a feature movie.
While Quibi shows were designed so they could be watched vertically on a phone and still have the images fill the screen (no black bars and minimized images), they also shot in the more traditional horizontal format. That removed the need for any reshoots for Sud when she decided to convert The Stranger to a feature-length movie, as she already had all the material to fit the standard format for movies.
The challenge that she and her editor, Phillip Fowler, faced was taking her story that was originally released to be consumed as 13 individual episodes and making it into a cohesive, naturally flowing movie.
Speaking with IndieWire, Sud said that when editing for Quibi, the key was creating climaxes for each episode to build the tension and create the desire for the viewer to find out what happens next. That wasn't the case with the feature, so she and Fowler went about "finding more nuance in the edit to help it flow." She does note they did have to remove some shots that were a bit "too in your face" to fit with what they were going for with the movie version.
All in all, the recut took about a month and a half, per Variety. The next thing was finding a new home for her reimagined story.
"All the platforms want content and this genre of psychological thrillers and horror is quite popular," Sud told Variety. "No one was like, 'we don't want it.' It was simply, 'we don't understand. Is this a TV show? Or a movie? How can a TV show become a movie? It doesn't make any sense?' And the answer was: 'Yes, it does. And here's why.'"
Eventually, Hulu came on board and now Sud's reworked The Stranger can now be enjoyed as a 98-minute viewing experience.
The Stranger is not the first Quibi project to enjoy a second life. Kevin Hart's comedy series Die Hart began as a Quibi series but then got a second season when it moved to The Roku Channel, as did the reality show Chrissy's Court starring Chrissy Teigen and the reboot of Reno 911. Another Quibi original, Sophie Turner and Corey Hawkins' Survive, preceded The Stranger in being converted into a feature-length movie, which is available to watch right now on Starz.
Sud summed up her personal drive (and that of others who worked with Quibi) like this to Variety: "The things that we spend years on, that matter to us, you need to just find incredible perseverance. You have to just keep finding different places for your work because there are so many more ways to distribute it."
The Stranger is available to stream right now exclusively on Hulu.
