Friend To The End (In Your Den): Chucky To Come Home In CHILD’S PLAY TV Series
Child's Play turns 30 this year. For those of us who grew up terrified of Chucky - the Good Guy Cabbage Patch-looking motherfucker inhabited by the soul of serial killer Charles Lee Ray - it's a reminder that time just keeps skipping along, and that we're no longer a bunch of Andy Barclays, running around telling our mothers that the Lakeshore Strangler is very much alive and coming to get us.
Since Tom Holland's iconic original slasher, co-writer/creator of the original Child's Play Don Mancini has taken the character in some rather weird-ass directions. Where Child's Play 2 and Child's Play 3 were fairly straight-forward early '90s stalk-and-slash sequels, Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky became black comedies, giving the little ginger destroyer a wife (voiced by Jennifer Tilly) and gender-confused kid (voiced by Billy Boyd) while letting him fuck with Redman's directorial debut and drive Britney Spears' car off the road. Shit was wild, fam.
Curse of Chucky and Cult of Chucky brought the movies back to being more sinister, while never really losing the odd sense of humor that permeated the pictures to their core. Cult ends on a note that definitely leaves the franchise open for continuation, and Mancini (of course) has some ideas on how that can happen, including a WW II picture and a TV series:
“I would love to do a World War II-era Chucky movie; I think that would be awesome. You know how in Raiders of the Lost Ark they say, ‘Hitler’s obsessed with the occult’? That’s the window in. It would be legitimately interesting to see Chucky in that milieu with the iconography and the archetypes of the World War II movie; he could be great.”
While that's certainly one direction, it sounds like the TV show is the more viable option. Speaking with Bloody-Disgusting, Mancini said that he's already got the concept hashed out with series producer David Kirschner, which includes an eight-part hour long event (and, of course, Brad Dourif returning as the voice of Charles Lee Ray):
“We plan to use Child’s Play in the title. We want to definitely signal that we are going dark, darker than ever before. It’s going to be very creepy.”
Kirschner confirmed with BD that the series is in the works, and stated that it's definitely not a reboot, but a continuation of the franchise as fans already know it.
This wouldn't be Mancini's first foray into television, as he's previously worked with Bryan Fuller on Hannibal (helping pen the episodes "Dolce" and "...And the Woman Clothed In Sun"), along with Nick Antosca's Channel Zero. Bloody-Disgusting also points to a previous interview that Antosca gave where he stated he already had a TV project set up with Mancini. Could they both be talking about Child's Play? We'll have to wait and see, Good Guys and Gals.
