A television adaptation of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles is headed to AMC, according to Variety. In addition to that series, an adaptation of another of Rice’s novels, The Lives of the Mayfair Witches, will also debut on the network.
Rice and her team have been working on a television series based on her classic vampire series for a couple of years. In 2017, Rice sold the rights to Paramount for a new TV project, with Bryan Fuller (creator of Hannibal, American Gods, and Star Trek: Discovery), set to assist. Hulu then picked up the rights to the project, while Dee Johnson was brought on as showrunner.
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But Hulu passed on the series late last year, with the indication that Rice was working to see who else might be interested, along with the rights to her Mayfair Witches trilogy.
That new home is now AMC, and the two shows now join the likes of The Walking Dead (and associated spinoffs), NOS4A2, The Terror, Preacher, Pantheon, and others. The Vampire Chronicles will certainly not be wanting for material: Rice has published 13 novels in the series over the years, while the Mayfair Witches consists of three novels (The Witching Hour, Lasher, and Taltos), which should be plenty of material for AMC to work with in the years ahead.
Rice hinted that the two shows might be part of an interconnected universe on television:
It’s always been my dream to see the worlds of my two biggest series united under a single roof so that filmmakers could explore the expansive and interconnected universe of my vampires and witches. That dream is now a reality, and the result is one of the most significant and thrilling deals of my long career.”
AMC did not say when the shows would debut on the network.
I am disappointed that Fuller no longer seems to be involved, but I retain high hopes that the show will be gorgeous and disturbing.
(If it manages to be good on top of that, so much the better, but for me personally, the highest appeal of Anne Rice has always been the lush prose and imagery, and I’m interested to see that transferred to television).
Yet another show that Bryan Fuller creates and then bails on it. What a surprise… not. Why do people keep taking him on if he can’t be counted on to stick around?
@2: How do you know the situation with Bryan Fuller as it pertains to this show? As the article pointed out, he was associated with the show in 2017 when he had his plate full with Star Trek: Discovery and American Gods. One person can only do so much. Besides, when the rights were sold to Hulu it’s possible that company wanted to go in a different direction and start over with a show runner of their own choice or maybe Fuller had a different vision of the show than Hulu. So criticizing Fuller seems very unwarranted when you don’t know the whole story.
MORE Vampires? It looks as though Coronavirus2019 isn’t the only infestation that continues to spread …
On a more serious note, I wonder which characters and which versions of the characters they’ll be going with? Shall Lestat be the annoyingly-charismatic brat of a serial killer to whom we were first introduced or will he hit the Insufferable Vampire Protagonist zone in his very first episode?
ALSO – will he talk like Sam Spade as played by Jean-Claude Van Damme, as described in the novels?
Damn, I read all of these way back in the early 90s, along with the Witches trilogy, and I barely remember anything about them at this point. I did have a very memorable acid trip a few years later during which I happened to see a Danzig video on MTV and was immediately thoroughly convinced that the entire story was 100% true and Danzig was in reality Lestat.
Time for a ‘who would you cast?” post?
Over the years I have had a few trips and believed that one band or another was Lestat! Jack White is probably the current one!
I am many years removed from the books, but the vampires and witches crossed over already