MGM’s upcoming Child’s Play reboot is currently getting a lot of backlash, but a reset of this series could’ve happened a lot sooner if Universal had stuck with their original idea of giving the demonic doll the remake treatment.
To offer some context, these plans were being thrown around in the long, Chucky-free period between 2004’s Seed of Chucky and 2013’s Curse of Chucky, at a time when horror remakes – at least from a studio perspective – were all the rage. But while the likes of 2009’s Friday the 13th and 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street did well enough on a commercial level, the fans weren’t too pleased with the movies they paid to see.
At a Q&A session for Screamfest, Child’s Play creator Don Mancini recalled how Universal cancelled their plans after seeing the unfavorable response to these previous reboots, freeing the writer-director up to continue the timeline with Curse:
“They didn’t really make that much of a splash, so then people started to rethink that. We thought with Curse we could have our cake and eat it too. We made it sort of a tonal reboot that turned out to be a sequel in disguise if that makes sense.”
The 2013 flick had some surprise connections to the features that came before but took the series in a less comedy-based direction that continued with 2017’s Cult of Chucky. That picture, in turn, contained some deliberate cliffhangers that Mancini intends to resolve with Child’s Play: The TV Series.
Just a few months ago, however, MGM complicated matters by announcing plans for a movie that will reboot the franchise and rebrand Chucky as an A.I. gone psycho. With Mancini still pushing ahead with his project, the property is now in the awkward position of having two parallel timelines being worked on simultaneously. While it remains to be seen whether the Child’s Play movie or TV show will emerge as the superior product, the criticism that the new Chucky has received makes it all too clear that Mancini has the fans on his side.
Published: Oct 16, 2018 07:12 pm