While Orion gears up to release their own Child’s Play, let’s not forget that Don Mancini is still continuing his original franchise with a franchise-first TV series that’s currently in the works for Syfy. Last we heard, “Chucky” is the current working title of the series, with “Channel Zero” creator Nick Antosca on board to produce. We’re expecting its arrival sometime in 2020.
Speaking with Bleeding Cool, Brad Dourif confirms his involvement this week.
“Don Mancini‘s TV series is happening. It’s going to happen. Yes, yes absolutely,” Dourif told the site. “We’ve spoken more than once, and absolutely [I’m involved]. It’s his baby, he invented it, it came from him, he’s the real source. And he’s managed, on more than one occasion with a shift in the genre to really find an exciting and different way of doing it, and it’s always worked. I think it’s pretty good, and I don’t feel that way about most things.”
He added, “I mean with Chucky, we’re not talking about the deepest level of human nature or anything like that, but it’s great fun. And Don knows exactly the right tone, every time.”
In a recent chat with Slash Film, Antosca noted that the series will be ditching the over-the-top comedy of some of the later installments, instead recapturing the tone of the early films.
“The series is going to be closer to the tone of the first two movies in the series,” Antosca told the site. “It’s going to go back to a sort of classic scare.”
So will “Chucky” be a continuation of Cult of Chucky or something else entirely? Mancini recently described the series as “a fresh take on the franchise,” suggesting that it’ll primarily be telling a new story with new characters. And while that does seem to be the case, the good news is that the series will still very much exist within the continuity of Universal’s films.
“It’s consistent with that mythology, but it’s a whole new story,” Antosca explained. “So you could come into it without knowing anything about the previous stuff and get into it. But it is consistent with all the mythology that has come before, so it is in canon.”
Antosca noted that the door has been left open for Jennifer Tilly and Fiona Dourif to appear in the series, but again, the primary focus is to tell new stories with new characters.