As first promised in 2012, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard are attempting to return the vampire to an age when he still retained an aristocratic, ruffled-shirt stateliness, before he began feeding on John Varvatos catalogs. Their Imagine Entertainment first optioned Anne Rice’s The Tale Of The Body Thief for a movie to be produced by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, and now that same team has partnered with Universal on a deal that gives them the rights to all of the author’s Vampire Chronicles series—some 13 novels in all, including this year’s upcoming Prince Lestat—for adaptation into a film franchise.
This franchise would run in tandem with the studio’s already-announced shared cinematic universe for its classic monsters, also overseen by franchise despot Kurtzman. It’s unclear as yet whether those worlds would interconnect, as is seemingly demanded of every modern movie, or whether film can sustain as many as two separate vampire stories.
Rice’s books have been previously adapted as 1994’s Interview With The Vampire and 2002’s Queen Of The Damned, and it seems likely that both of those will have to be remade eventually, due to concerns of series continuity and Stuart Townsend looking like he’s in Stabbing Westward. Those decisions will be made soon enough; what’s important now is that we’ve been assured enough vampire movies to sustain us well into the coming decades.