Like her tortured, morally conflicted protagonists, the world of film and TV hasn’t treated Anne Rice’s long-running Vampire Chronicles terribly well. Interview With The Vampire managed to milk some fun out of Tom Cruise as Rice’s ageless anti-hero Lestat (and Kirsten Dunst as vicious baby-vamp Claudia) but was ultimately kind of a mess, and the less said about Queen Of The Damned, the better. Now, though, Rice has cut a deal with Paramount that might give her 500-page tomes some room to (not) breathe on the screen.
Empire reports that Paramount TV has signed on for Rice’s previous plans to turn The Vampire Chronicles into a television show. It sounds like Rice will be heavily involved with the series, telling reporters, “I want to develop a plan for a series truly based on the Chronicles, not simply a loose adaptation or compression, which the movies made necessary. But open-ended TV where you can take a book like The Vampire Lestat and you can begin with that book and maybe do two whole seasons of the television series just devoted to that book.”
There’s no network attached for the series as of yet, but it seems like a safe guess that it’ll air on the studio’s own Paramount Network, which just recently had its name changed from Spike. (Insert your own Buffy The Vampire Slayer jokes here.) Rice’s son, Christopher will serve as a writer and executive producer on the show; meanwhile, the author is currently working on her 13th main series Vampire Chronicles book, which the show will presumably cover some time around season 23.