Hulu isn’t moving forward with its adaptation of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles novels, according to Variety. The paper has learned that Rice and her team are working to sell the series elsewhere.
Rice kicked off the series with Interview with the Vampire in 1976, about a vampire named Louis de Pointe du Lac as he recounts his story to a reporter. Rice followed up the novel with 13 additional novels, the latest being Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat in 2018. The book was adapted in 1994 with Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst, and Antonio Banderas, while another adaptation, Queen of the Damned, hit films in 2002. In 2014, Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment picked up the rights to the series, with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci set to helm the films, although that project later collapsed.
In 2017, Paramount optioned the series shortly after Rice revealed that the rights had reverted back to her. At the time, she indicated that she was interested in bringing the series to television, noting that “such a series is THE way to let the entire story of the vampires unfold,” and that she and her son would be developing the series.
Bryan Fuller (who worked on Hannibal, American Gods, and Star Trek Discovery) joined the project for a short while in 2018, which Hulu then picked up that summer. Earlier this year, Dee Johnson (Boss, Nashville, and Mars), joined the series as showrunner.
Variety notes that Rice and her team are working to see what other networks might be interested in the project, along with the rights to her Mayfair Witches trilogy (The Witching Hour, Lasher, and Taltos). Given the hunt for content from streaming services, it seems likely that we’ll see the project land at some other outlet in the near future.
