Disney+ won't air its already-completed Spiderwick Chronicles show
Despite having already filmed the series, based on the best-selling YA books, Disney has shrugged and just pre-canceled the Christian Slater-starring series
Despite having reportedly completed all filming on the six-episode series, Disney+ won’t actually be airing its TV adaptation of Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black’s Spiderwick Chronicles books, Deadline reports. The project, announced back in November of 2021, is apparently the latest casualty of the streaming service’s ongoing efforts to aggressively clean house, which have also seen many of its original series—launched with so much fanfare over the last few years—get unceremoniously shuffled off of the service’s streaming library.
In that sense, the cancellation of Spiderwick can be seen as a sort of pre-emptive move, since you don’t have to delete a show you haven’t ever actually bothered to broadcast. The series would have been an adaptation of DiTerlizzi and Black’s well-loved YA series, originally published in 2003, about a family who stumbles onto a book that reveals the lore of fairies and other mythical creatures. The series was previously adapted for film in 2008 by Mean Girls director Mark Waters, with a young Freddie Highmore in the starring role.
All that being said, there’s still a decent chance Spiderwick might see the light of day. The show was a rare instance of Disney+ planning to run material partially produced by an outside studio—in this case, Paramount Television, working with Disney’s 20th Century—and so plans are apparently in place to possibly shop it around. The already-shot series stars Jack Dylan Grazer, Lyon Daniels, Noah Cottrell, Joy Bryant, and Mychala Lee, with Christian Slater onboard to play the first season’s villain, the shape-shifting ogre Mulgarath. Meanwhile, Disney isn’t giving up on YA adaptations entirely; the streamer is still going all-in on its adaptation of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books—although in that case, the show is being developed in-house, and is based on novels that Disney originally published through its Hyperion book label, so it’s not hard to see why it might be getting preferential treatment.