This Mila Kunis-Backed TV Show Lets NFT Holders Choose the Plot

The small but blossoming non-fungible television space got a bit bigger on Monday with the announcement of “The Gimmicks,” an animated wrestling show backed by actress Mila Kunis’ Sixth Wall production company.

The adult series, self-described as “South Park meets WWE,” follows a group of washed-up wrestlers longing for former glory, with characters voiced by World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) stars Luke “Doc” Gallows, Karl “Machine Gun” Anderson and Rocky Romero, according to a press release.

The non-fungible token (NFT) component comes in the form of a “choose your own adventure” mode for owners of the show’s NFTs, allowing holders to vote on the direction of the show’s plot at the end of each episode.

The NFTs go on sale March 18 on the show’s website and will be free to mint on the Solana blockchain.

“I see the tech and community that comes with NFTs and Web 3 allowing for the audience to directly communicate with and inform creators of what they like and what they don't,” Kunis told CoinDesk in a statement. “There is space for traditional film and television development as well as this more Wild West fun chaos that comes along with developing in Web 3.”

Kunis’ crypto-vision debut came last summer, when the crowdfunded her animated series “Stoner Cats” through an NFT collection, token-gating the episodes. That project lived on Ethereum.

The pipe dream of token-backed content creation is a landscape where producers and filmmakers can fundraise for projects while retaining creative control and distribution rights, and in recent months, that dream’s rubber has met the road on multiple occasions.

NFT artist Pplpleasr launched her streaming platform Shibuya earlier in March, with NFTs to watch the pilot episode of its first series “White Rabbit'' doing 431 ETH (around $1.1 million) in sales volume.

Ritestream, a decentralized platform for content creators to fundraise long form video content, is preparing to launch out of its beta next week, giving anyone who invests in films via token ownership of eventual distribution rights.

Kunis’ new show is being created in partnership with Web 3 animation studio Toonstar, and is written by Dave Ihlenfeld and David Wright, who previously worked on the popular animated hits "Family Guy" and "The Simpsons."