I haven’t gone back to director Alex Proyas’s sci-fi thriller Dark City (you can watch the theatrical cut HERE or the director’s cut at THIS LINK) all that many times since seeing it in the theatre back in 1998, but I recently did a deep dive into the film while writing the script for the WTF Happened to This Horror Movie episode embedded above, and after doing that I can definitely see why Proyas would be interested in exploring the concept further through a television series. Proyas revealed that he is developing a Dark City TV series during a Q&A that was recorded for the screening of his short film Mask of the Evil Apparition at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival.
For the Q&A, Proyas was interviewed by Mayhem director Joe Lynch. Our friends at Bloody Disgusting were able to watch the video and report that Proyas said,
Dark City right now is really an intriguing one to me because we’re developing a series, a Dark City series, which we’re in the very early stages [of] but I’m having to reanalyze in order to construct a new story. I’m having to go back and kind of jog my memory as to what we actually did and what I think worked and what I think didn’t work and re-evaluate my own film, so that’s been a very interesting experience as well which I’ve not done before.”
Scripted by Proyas, Lem Dobbs, and David S. Goyer, the film Dark City tells the following story:
John Murdoch awakens alone in a strange hotel to find that he is wanted for a series of brutal murders. The problem is that he can’t remember whether he committed the murders or not. For one brief moment, he is convinced that he has gone completely mad. Murdoch seeks to unravel the twisted riddle of his identity. As he edges closer to solving the mystery, he stumbles upon a fiendish underworld controlled by a group of ominous beings collectively known as the Strangers.
Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, William Hurt, Jennifer Connelly, Richard O’Brien, Bruce Spence, Colin Friels, and Melissa George star.
Roger Ebert considered Dark City to be the best movie of 1998.