By How did I miss that they’d announced a Locke & Key trilogy? What is quite possibly my favorite self-contained comic series (a scant one issue away from it’s conclusion, due out NEXT WEEK), by one of my absolute favorite authors (Joe Hill, writer of Horns and NOS4A2) is getting a trilogy and I missed the announcement? I almost spat my Greek yogurt all over my computer screen in excitement.
However, all is not well in Hollywoodland (it’s like Christmasland, with less children with fishhook teeth and more lawyers with fishhook teeth)! Universal is worried that Fox, who own the pilot of the television version of the comic, might try to steal some thunder by releasing the pilot around the same time.
Here’s the sitch, in Hill’s words:
[Universal is] dealing with a bureaucracy as labyrinthine and implacable as their own: FOX TV. Uni wants to avoid spending $25 million on a movie, and then have FOX steal their thunder by releasing a three-year-old pilot.FOX wants to see some coin on all the money they sank into the pilot in the first place. The lawyers all have to validate their salaries. That said, Alex and Bob are the two most tenacious people I’ve ever met, and if anyone can see ‘Locke & Key’ through the contractual maze, and on into production, it’s them.
Of course all this could’ve been avoided if FOX had just made the series. I know I’m biased, but I kinda think they bet on the wrong ponies that season.
I sincerely doubt that a 42-minute pilot would steal much thunder from a planned trilogy (although it’d be great if they got Nick Stahl to reprise his role as uncle Duncan), but it’s this kind of Hollywood bureaucracy that can turn a guy’s hair white. Now that I know there’s going to be not just one, but a theoretical trilogy, of movies based on one of the best comic properties of the last twenty years, I can’t even fathom having that taken away from me.
Sound of in the comments with your thoughts.
[via io9]