It’s been almost a year and a half since it was first announced that Saw co-creator and The Invisible Man director Leigh Whannell’s criminally-underrated sci-fi action thriller Upgrade was being developed for television, but we’ve heard almost nothing on the project since.
As it turns out, that’s because Jason Blum effectively tossed the first set of scripts he received in the trash and asked the creative team to start all over again. In a new interview with Collider, the Blumhouse head honcho admitted that he’s not interested in painstakingly ironing out the kinks; he wants something good enough to land a full-season commitment right out of the gate.
“Upgrade should have been a wide release. I was pissed about that. We’re working on a TV show. So working on the scripts. This first round, didn’t come out. I didn’t get the response I wanted to get. I don’t want to be in development. I want an order. We’re working on the scripts again, so that we can get an order. And I don’t want to develop it.”
Upgrade has slowly but surely been finding sustained life as an unsung cult classic, and while the movie itself was never designed with sequels in mind, the central conceit definitely lends itself to further exploration. A sentient AI named STEM has the potential to assume control of a human body, which is about as open-ended a pitch as you could hope to find.
Whannell was originally set to direct the entire run of episodes himself, but it remains unclear if that’s still the case when the process of bringing Upgrade to the small screen has proven to be trickier than expected.