Wattpad Partners with ViacomCBS to Adapt Stories to Streaming

Wattpad, a platform used to host both fan fiction and original fiction, has announced a new partnership with ViacomCBS. Viacom will adapt original stories from Wattpad as well as the webcomic platform WEBTOON into series to stream on Paramount+. Wattpad was purchased this year by Naver, the parent company of WEBTOON, for $600 million dollars.

This isn’t Wattpad’s first venture into streaming adaptations: The Kissing Booth and After on Netflix both began as Wattpad stories. (After was a One Direction fan fiction.) Wattpad states that its stories come with “built-in Gen Z and millennial global fandoms” and that they hold a lot of data about the browsing habits of users, making it easier to spot stories that would perform will in an adaptation.