Deadline is reporting that Morgan Freeman and Lori McCreary’s Revelations Entertainment has picked up the rights to Brian Lumley’s long-running Necroscope series. From the looks of it, the studio is intending to build out a bigger science fiction/horror franchise that will be spread out across a variety of mediums, including television, video games, graphic novels, and more.
Lumley got his start writing cosmic horror set in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos in the 1970s with books like Beneath the Moors and The Burrowers Beneath. In 1986, he released the first book in his long-running series, Necroscope, which followed the adventures of Harry Keogh, who has the ability to speak with dead people. In that first book, he discovers his abilities while at school, and is eventually recruited into a governmental group that uses psychic abilities to spy on the Soviet Union. Along the way, there are some vampires, teleportation, and quite a bit more.
The series has stretched on for a further seventeen installments, the last of which was published in 2013. That’s plenty of material for a studio to work with, and in a statement, McCreary told Deadline that “the Necroscope universe allows us to explore the global themes of horror in a way never done before and is a great addition to our slate of epic, award-winning, large scale IP,” while Freeman noted that it’s a classic story of good verses evil.
They also note that there’s far too much for a single film, and that the entire series could be developed into a much larger franchise. Given the prevalence of streaming services and the race to develop these larger franchises to attract subscribers, this feels like a project that’s ideal for somewhere like Netflix (which has been building out other, non-film products like graphic novels, through Mark Millar’s Millarworld).
As of yet, however, Revelations Entertainment has yet to line up a studio or streamer for this project.
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