Strange fairies and eerie homes will be on your screens after all! The series adaptation of Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi’s The Spiderwick Chronicles has found a new home at Roku. The eight-episode first season is expected to air early next year.
This take on the children’s book series was announced as a Disney+ series back in 2021, but this August, Disney made the questionable decision to simply not air the completed first season. As Deadline wrote at the time, “The decision comes as Disney — along with other media companies — have been reevaluating their streaming strategies by cutting programming costs with a renewed focus on profitability.” Additionally, Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva now notes, “I hear the series was deemed to be darker than the typical Disney+ fare.”
The Spiderwick Chronicles follows the Grace family as they make a big move to their family’s ancestral home—which is full of mysteries and surprises. The adaptation stars Joy Bryant as mom Helen Grace; Noah Cottrell and Lyon Daniels as twins Simon and Jared Grace; Mychala Lee as sister Mallory; Jack Dylan Grazer as the voice of Thimbletack; and Christian Slater as the villainous Mulgarath. Black and DiTerlizzi are executive producers, along with Kat Coiro (who directed the first two episodes) and showrunner Aron Eli Coleite—who also developed Locke & Key and was a writer on Heroes, Star Trek: Discovery, and Daybreak.
No release date has been announced, beyond “early 2024.”
This post was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.
