As reported by Deadline, dependable horror movie production company Blumhouse has just bought a 45 percent stake in independent television studio ITV, and it will now be launching a dedicated Blumhouse Television branch that will develop and finance “scripted and unscripted ‘dark’ genre programming.” Naturally, Blumhouse’s first act as a TV maker is to start promoting one of its reliable horror brands, so the Deadline story says the studio has formally picked up a TV adaptation of The Purge series for USA and Syfy.
The Purge series has been in the works since last September, but the plans back then were still kind of vague and tentative. Now that Blumhouse can just make the show itself, though, things have begun moving forward. The original plan was for the show to be an anthology about disparate stories that all converge on Purge night (when “all crime” is legal), but the Deadline story doesn’t have much more than that.
Aside from the Purge show, Blumhouse is now backing Secure And Hold: The Last Days Of Roger Ailes, a previously announced miniseries about the former Fox News president who was ousted amidst allegations of sexual abuse. The project comes from Spotlight director Tom McCarthy and journalist Gabe Sherman, and it has now been picked up by Showtime. This news comes in the wake of yet another Fox News contributor accusing Ailes of sexual harassment, so this is a pretty timely show to pick up.