Way back in 2015, when the first Goosebumps movie was still fresh in everyone’s minds, Fox decided to cash in on the potential of a kid-friendly horror series by developing a more teen-friendly offshoot based on R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books. Then, because Marvel had successfully turned movie-going into a job at that point, Fox decided to transform the Fear Street movie into three Fear Street movies that would all be released back-to-back in theaters once a month. At the time, it was compared to the “bing-watch” structure of a streaming service, and if it had actually happened, it might’ve saved the theater industry through sheer force of ridiculousness. It didn’t happen, though, despite the movies going into production back in 2019.
Now, though, Disney has apparently realized that the Fear Street trilogy has been sitting on a shelf alongside all of the other forgotten things it picked up from 20th Century Fox, so it has worked out a deal to hand the movies over to Netflix. According to Deadline, the streaming platform is now going to give them the binge-friendly release that Fox wanted all along as part of a multi-month event in 2021 that Netflix is calling “The Summer Of Fear”—only now it’s going to be on Netflix, where this structure makes sense, rather than coming out in theaters every month for three months.
Again, these movies—directed by Leigh Janiak—are all apparently done, but Netflix is saving them until next summer. We don’t know why it couldn’t just do “The Fall Of Fear” or “The Winter Of Fear” and get them out quicker, but maybe it knows that next summer will be way scarier than the rest of 2020. We really hope that’s not it, though. Either way, the movies are about spooky happenings in a specific small town in Ohio across three different time periods, and they feature Kiana Madeira, Gillian Jacobs, Olivia Welch, and Benjamin Flores Jr.