Back in 2011, Steven Spielberg executive produced a pilot for a potential Fox television show based on Joe Hill's IDW comic book series Locke & Key. Directed by Mark Romanek, the pilot was written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci and starred Miranda Otto, Jesse McCartney, Sarah Bolger, Skylar Gertner, and Nick Stahl. The finished product was presented to Fox… and the network decided not to move forward with the series.
History repeated itself earlier this year. Hill teamed with Carlton Cuse (Lost, Bates Motel) to develop a second attempt at turning Locke & Key into a series. IT's Andy Muschietti directed the pilot, which starred Jack Mulhern, Megan Charpentier, Jackson Robert Scott, Frances O'Connor, Nate Corddry, Owen Teague, Samantha Mathis, and Danny Glover. The finished product was presented to the streaming network Hulu, and again the opportunity to turn Locke & Key into a series was declined.
But this time there might be some hope. Mathis mentioned in an interview that the show was being shopped around to Amazon, Netflix, and Apple, and now That Hashtag Show has heard that Netflix is in discussions with IDW to acquire the series.
A Netflix rep got in contact with the site not to deny the scoop, but to say that there is no deal in place yet. So the new iteration of Locke & Key hasn't officially been rescued at this point, but there's a chance.
David Ozer, President of IDW Entertainment, has said,
Being such an important franchise for IDW Entertainment, we hope to have an announcement regarding the Locke & Key series in the near future."
Locke & Key tells of
three siblings who, after the gruesome murder of their father, move to their ancestral home in Maine. They soon discover the house has magical keys that give the bearers a vast array of powers and abilities. Little do they know (but they soon will) that a devious demon also wants the keys.
Joe Hill and his collaborators obviously have a great deal of interest in telling those stories in live action (after the first pilot was rejected, Kurtzman and Orci also tried to get a trilogy of Locke & Key films made at Universal), so hopefully this project will catch a break soon.