Everyone knows the old “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again” proverb, but it has a special significance to Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s critically acclaimed comic book series Locke & Key. Not because it’s related to the book itself at all, though, it’s actually because people have been trying to make it into a movie or TV show for years, and since they have yet to succeed, they continue to try, try, try again. Fox had a Locke & Key pilot in the works in 2011 that never took off, and then Universal picked up the rights and tried to make a feature film in 2013 (even going so far as to hire a writer a year later). That adaptation also never happened, but since that’s only two tries, there needs to be a third one in order to properly fulfill the proverb’s prophecy.
The third try is coming from Hill himself, who is re-teaming with IDW Entertainment—the company that originally published the books—to make a new Locke & Key TV show. According to Deadline, Hill is writing and executive producing the pilot, which is being developed at Circle Of Confusion (a production company that works on The Walking Dead). Hill says he envisions the six original books of the series as being “very like six seasons of a cable TV series,” so he says it “feels only natural” to bring the books to TV and “scare the pants off viewers everywhere.”
Locke & Key is about the members of the Locke family, who narrowly escape a killer and have to put their lives back together while staying at the old family home in the not-at-all-ominously named town of Lovecraft, Massachusetts. As it turns out, the house contains a bunch of magical keys that do all sorts of crazy/terrifying stuff when used, and things go pretty poorly for the Locke family from there.
In related news, the fourth attempt to adapt Locke & Key will be underway at some point in 2019 or so.