Hulu’s Locke & Key adaptation suffered a bit of a setback recently, when executive producer Scott Derrickson stepped back as director for the long-gestating pilot. It seems the Doctor Strange director is a little tied up with TNT’s upcoming Snowpiercer adaptation, which stars Jennifer Connelly and Daveed Diggs. Despite Derrickson’s undeniable talents, this has proven to be a mere bump in the road for the series, which has stopped and stalled over the years. According to Empire Online, Hulu’s tapped Andy Muschietti, the director of the It remake, to helm the pilot.
There’s a certain poetry to the new arrangement, as the Locke & Key comic series was written by Joe Hill, son of horror master—and It author—Stephen King. Illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez, the Locke & Key series centers on the Locke family and the magical Keyhouse. A fight for control of the portals housed within that mystical locale has raged since the American Revolution, which the TV series aims to dramatize, with some help from showrunner Carlton Cuse. Hill and Cuse’s project is the second attempt in the last decade to get the writer’s work on the small screen; in 2011, Nick Stahl and Mirando Otto starred in a pilot that was ultimately rejected by Fox.