Way back in January of 2016 it was announced that TNT would be teaming with filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan for a reboot of the classic horror anthology series Tales from the Crypt.
Unfortunately, the project ran into trouble as it attempted to secure the underlying rights to the property, with the network ultimately giving up and pulling the plug on its plans last summer.
While the door – or should that be crypt? – was left open to revisit the project should the rights issues clear up, Shyamalan has now confirmed to Digital Spy that the reboot is dead:
“I think it’s dead. We tried everything that we could. That was so mired in people that had rights to it… constantly mired from the original comic books to the people that did the original show and that was a very contentious era for that show and who was involved and all the stuff that had nothing to do with me, a generation before me. I begged them, ‘Please just give me the rights, we’ll do it this way, you’re going to be really happy’. But it didn’t work out that way and here we are.”
The Tales from the Crypt reboot was originally intended as the centrepiece of a block of horror programming on TNT and curated by Shyamalan, with the network developing two other shows entitled Time of Death and Creatures. The current status of those two projects is unknown.