Movies
Stephen King’s ‘The Mist’ TV Series Heading to Spike
Back in September, we posted that Stephen King’s The Mist was going to head to television for a series. At that time, all we knew was that the show would be adapted by Christian Torpe, who wrote the successful Danish show “Rita” and that King himself gave his blessings. But that’s all we knew.
Now, news has come via Deadline that Spike has give the pilot order for the series from Dimension Television, marking the first Spike scripted dramatic series since the company changed their network approach. Additionally, Torpe has been bumped up to executive producer.
Spike Executive Vice President of Original Series Sharon Levy states, “We are thrilled to join forces with the incredibly creative Christian Torpe and Dimension Films to develop Stephen King’s enthralling novella to a compelling series unlike anything else on television.”
As you all know, I absolutely love The Mist. I think it’s one of the finest horror films of the 2000’s as it mixes the terror of the unknown with the horror of humanity at its worst. It’s a shining example of all that horror has to offer, including a fair bit of gore for all you bloodhounds! Plus, the story’s influence on the Silent Hill franchise can’t be ignore and you all know how obsessed I am with those games!
The nature of the the original story and the film definitely allows it to lend itself towards a TV series. There are more than enough events that take place for each episode to have a focus. Furthermore, a TV series could go beyond the supermarket and into other homes, other businesses, other locations to show new groups of people and what they have to do in order to survive. For all we know, the supermarket story is the tamest and least horrific example of what The Mist has to offer.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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