Sad news today for fans of Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Eisner-nominated fantasy-horror series Locke & Key: Hulu has decided to pass on a pilot for a TV adaptation of the book, about a family of young kids who stumble onto a cache of magical keys that grant them various supernatural powers.
People have been trying to get a Locke & Key TV series out the door for a few years now; Fox tried to get something similar put together back in 2010, to no avail. The most surprising thing about Hulu’s decision today, though, is how much energy had already been put into the production; the initial script came from Hill himself, while Andy Muschietti—who had a lot of success adapting the work of Hill’s father, novelist Stephen King, with last year’s It—was directing. Hulu had even set up a writers’ room and built full sets for the series, in the expectation that it would be moving forward. According to co-star Samantha Mathis, the pilot is currently being shopped around to other various streaming services like Amazon and Netflix, although nobody’s currently in serious talks to possibly pick it up.