EXCLUSIVE: Fifth Season is set to produce The Family Disappears, a new comedy from Bad Apples helmer Jonatan Etzler starring two-time Emmy winner David Harbour and Emmy nominee John Cena.

Based on an original script by Brendan O’Hare with thriller undertones, The Family Disappears follows an overworked dad who returns from a work trip to find his family has disappeared and a mysterious newcomer has bought and moved into their home.

Fifth Season is the studio behind the film. Producers are Nick Weidenfeld through Friends Night and Alexis Garcia through CAT5, who together made the comedy Friendship, starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, for Fifth Season and A24.

Pic seems thematically and perhaps tonally in the vein of that title, as well as DTF St. Louis, HBO’s darkly comedic meditation on suburban dysfunction that just brought Harbour a Emmy.

Production begins in Atlanta, Georgia on Nov. 10.

Harbour stars opposite Jason Bateman and Linda Cardellini in DTF St. Louis, the limited series from Steven Conrad, which was one of the big hits of this Emmy season with seven wins from 13 nominations. Finishing off his five seasons with Stranger Things just ahead of the new year, he has a packed slate coming up, including Courteney Cox’s crime thriller Evil Genius, launched out of TIFF, plus Violent Night 2; the dark comedy Little One produced by Zach Cregger and Roy Lee; Avengers: Doomsday, where he reprises as Red Guardian; John Rambo; and Fifth Season’s A Head Full of Ghosts. He is represented by WME, Untitled, and Sloane Offer Weber & Dern.

Cena scored his first Emmy nom this year as exec producer of Prime Video’s action comedy Heads of State, in which he starred opposite Idris Elba. Most recently seen in Coyote vs. Acme and the Netflix comedy Little Brother, his upcoming slate includes Sam Hargrave’s Apple original Matchbox the Movie, and the Netflix comedy One Attempt Remaining, where he stars opposite Jennifer Garner. He is repped by WME, Intenta, and Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole.

Etzler is a Swedish filmmaker coming off directing the critically acclaimed dark comedy Bad Apples, starring Saoirse Ronan. He’s also directed the Swedish Netflix original One More Time and several shorts, in addition to working on the HBO series Beartown. He is repped by CAA, Lark, and Gang, Tyre, Ramer.

A writer and director who co-created the animated special Eggland and scripted podcast This Is Branchburg for Adult Swim, O’Hare has also written for series at Netflix and HBO, plus platforms like The New Yorker and Clickhole. He is repped by UTA and Entertainment 360.

Coming off the release of Zoe Kazan’s critically acclaimed Netflix limited series East of Eden, based on the John Steinbeck novel — previously adapted for film by her famed grandfather, Elia Kazan — Fifth Season next premieres The Good Daughter, starring Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy, on Peacock Nov. 12.

Comic creators Tony Fleecs and Tim Seeley love to tug on, then mess with, your nostalgia.

Fleecs did it ably with Stray Dogs, his serial killer mini-series told from the point of view of canines with art harkening back to the Don Bluth animated movies from the 1980s. Seeley, who separately created the horror homage Hack/Slash, and Fleecs were also behind Local Man, a murder mystery that featured callbacks to the 1990s superheroics and stylings of Image Comics.

The two are now giving a spin on the Disney princess genre and true to their nature, there will be blood.

Mixing fairy tale romance with a Giallo, The Princess Murders from Image centers on two princesses, the fair Princess Lottie and her wicked stepsister Edwige who arrive to the Kingdom of Sardinia in order to compete with other princesses from across the globe for the hand of the handsome Prince Carlo. Backstabbing, both literal and figurative, begins when a black-gloved killer stalks the castle and the sisters have to fight to survive.

But messing with your nostalgia isn’t just stopping with the comic or the themed-covers. No, the duo decided to take it one step further, this time creating a trailer made to look — and sound — like a Disney animated princess movie musical. The trailer is being released Wednesday timed to a New York Comic Con panel with the two creators.

“We wanted Princess Murders to feel as close to those classic animated princess movies as possible. And it’s not just the design and the colors and the characters, there’s also music!” Fleecs wrote in an email.

“There are little original songs and snippets in every issue of The Princess Murders but because comics are words and pictures on paper, you have to imagine what the songs sound like for yourself,” he wrote. “I knew for the trailer we wanted to actually HEAR the song and it had to sound EXACTLY like those classic animated songs.”

Fleecs called a film composer friend, Nima Fakhrara, who arranged the song with the lyrics Fleecs and Seeley wrote. Fakhrara then brought in vocalist Maria Schafer. The result is “Can’t You Feel It.”

“It’s exactly what Tim and I imagined these princesses would sound like… before they get murdered,” he wrote.

Fleecs and Seeley are co-writing and co-drawing Princess Murders, which will be an ongoing series, with the first issue hitting stores Dec. 9. Brian Reber is the colorist.

Check out the trailer, and some of the variant covers, below.

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