At least something good came out of Fox TV’s decision not to pick up the DreamWorks produced Locke & Key pilot that made the rounds in 2011 — now Universal has acquired the rights to adapt the beloved comic book series into a movie trilogy, and they’ve gotten some amazing writers to do it. Hooray! Big screen Lovecraftian horrors for everyone!
Written by Gabriel Rodriguez and Joe Hill (who has Stephen King for a dad, thus explaining everything), the Locke & Key comic books revolve around a trio of siblings who inherit the family home in Massachusetts after their father dies, and they discover that the keys to the house have supernatural powers. Hill and Rodriguez have won multiple Eisner awards for their work, and the series has made it to the New York Times bestseller list on more than one occasion.
Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Bobby Cohen have been attached to the movie project, which will be produced through the Universal-owned K/O Paper Products. Kurtzman and Orci have written for a number of Abrams projects, including Star Trek and Fringe, so they’ll probably have a good handle on adapting both the family drama and fantastical horror of the books to film.
Would the series have been a better television program than a movie trilogy, though? Not on Fox, I suspect, and not with similar family-members-defeating-demons shows like Supernatural still on the air. AMC or HBO might have been able to do something with it, but they’re a bit busy at the moment. Better to let a movie studio with a much higher effects budget devote their efforts to telling the story of the Locke family.
(via The Hollywood Reporter, image via ComicVine)
- Universal is also recreating Moe’s Tavern, because it loves you
- Between this and the Fables movie we are bugging out
- Rob Liefield wants Chris Pine to play him in a movie… meh
