'Dredd' Producer Releasing 'Dark Judges' As Free Online Miniseries

The line between "official" and "unofficial" gets weird with this announcement of an online Judge Dredd series, called Dark Judges, which seems to be meant as something between a sequel to the 2012 film and a "thank you" to passionate Dredd fans. Producer Adi Shankar helped make Dredd as a passion project. Now he is the one backing the online series. Many details about the series remain mysterious; what we know about the Dredd Dark Judges series is below.

This production is similar to the unofficial Punisher and Venom short films also backed by Shankar, though here he appears to be even more explicitly tying the online series to his film.

The Wrap says that Shankar will release at least the first part of the new series in November. It also reports that he has worked on Dark Judges for two years, which would put its inception date right at the time when Dredd bowed (and bombed) in domestic theaters. We do know that a year ago, Shankar talked about this series as a single short film during a Reddit AMA.

...I am working on a Dredd short in the vein of #DirtyLaundry ... you're actually the first person to know about this ...

Who wrote, directed, and stars in the new series? We don't know. We don't know if Karl Urban will be under the helmet of Dredd, assuming we even see the character. We do know that this series will be released online in seven free installments — essentially adding up to a feature film.

The Dark Judges of the online miniseries title are Judges Death, Fire, Fear and Mortis — a group of undead parallel dimension law-enforcers who follow Judge Death. The problem is, Death has concluded that all crime is committed by the living, which means that life itself is a crime. They seek to kill the residents of Mega-City One; Dredd seeks to prevent that from happening.

Here's Shankar thanking fans for their support of Dredd, in a video released on "Day of Dredd" this past September 29.

Here's the Punisher "Dirty Laundry" short, in case you missed it.