Having acquired a healthy stash of Hollywood capital after the smash success of his Oscar-winning horror satire Get Out—and the enthusiastic critical reception to Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, produced by his company Monkeypaw Productions—Jordan Peele has refused to be even remotely shy about spending it. Earlier today, Variety published a profile of Peele and Monkeypaw highlighting the many productions they have in the works, a bounty so overwhelming that we felt compelled to revisit our effort to try to get them all down here in one place, no matter how arduous a task it might prove to be.
The biggest entry in this quixotic effort, of course, is Us, Peele’s next directorial feature (or “new nightmare,” with apologies to Wes Craven). Although we know next to nothing about it—beyond the enigmatic poster, and Peele’s confirmation that it’ll be socially conscious in a way similar to Get Out—he has confirmed it’ll be in theaters in March of 2019. Given that Peele’s sophomore effort will be a make-or-break moment for his continued legacy, we can’t imagine he’d risk missing that deadline, either.
Now we’re forced to move away from the concrete, and into projects Peele has just talked about, but which might not have actually started production just yet. The biggest one here is probably the Twilight Zone reboot he’s supposedly leading the charge on for CBS All Access; it’s been six months since the show got the green light, with very little in the way of further news. Given Peele’s tastes, though, this does still seem like something that might hold his interests in the long-term.
Ditto Lorena, the Amazon Studios docuseries Peele got green-lit back in April, an attempt to tell the human story of Lorena Bobbit, a woman whose abuse at her husband’s hands was eventually turned into a nation-wide dick joke. It doesn’t hurt that Peele’s only serving as an executive producer on this one, with Joshua Rofé handling the actual directing duties. Similarly, Peele’s taking a backseat to Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas director director Henry Seilck for Wendell And Wild, a stop-motion animated project being produced under the Monkeypaw banner that’ll reunite Peele with his Key & Peele co-star Keegan-Michael Key.
Okay, that’s four projects; you probably think we’re done. We’re not done. Peele’s also got another Amazon series in the works, this one a fictional show about a bunch of cool, diverse Nazi hunters living in 1970s New York. The Hunt is still in early stages, but Amazon gave it the nod just last month, so it’s presumably still a going concern.
Still not done: This one requires reaching back a full year, but HBO also landed its own Peele show once upon a time, in the form of the literary adaptation Lovecraft Country, which he’s producing with Misha Green of Underground fame. Based on Matt Ruff’s book (which combines supernatural horrors with the more prosaic terror of two black people traveling across America during the height of the Jim Crow era), the show recently cast Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett-Bell in its lead roles. And in late June, Variety reported that Peele lined up yet another project for himself, collaborating with his old Key & Peele colleague Charlie Sanders for a new YouTube Premium anthology series, Weird City, that’s set to air some time in 2019.
And okay, yeah, now we’re finished. Honestly, we’re exhausted just researching and typing all that out; we can’t imagine how relentless Peele has to be to keep this entire china cabinet’s worth of plates in the air. No fucking wonder he passed on adding the live-action Akira movie to the pile.