Despite MGM’s controversial plans to reboot the Chucky franchise, writer Don Mancini and producer David Kirschner are pushing forward with their canon-honoring Child’s Play: The TV Series, and now they’ve offered a few hints of what to expect from the demonic doll’s return.
At the 20th anniversary screening of Bride of Chucky, the two men who helped created this horror property answered some questions about about their planned 8-part series. Mancini explained that the show will be continuing on from what we saw in 2017’s Cult of Chucky, albeit with new characters and settings.
“We deliberately ended Cult with a bunch of cliffhangers to set up a TV series,” Mancini said.
“Because there are so many different threads now, television could best accommodate that so that was done intentionally. At the same time, we have a whole new world, a bunch of new characters which we can say nothing about.”
While the pair are largely keeping their plans under wraps, they did suggest that the project will, in some ways, take the franchise back to its roots.
“The only thing I think we can say is from the original film that Don wrote, Child’s Play, we are playing with that concept again, the idea of child’s play,” Kirschner said. “I’ll let you guys fill in the pieces of that.”
If that’s too ambiguous, Mancini then clarified that “It involves children.”
Sure enough, the show looks to have a lot more in common with the previous movies than the upcoming feature film, which is doing away with the doll’s possession-based origins to instead offer an A.I. gone psychotic. At the same time, though Mancini’s series will be maintaining the continuity of the previous flicks – not to mention the continued involvement of Brad Dourif – the filmmaker also provided a reminder that Child’s Play is still a property that’s not afraid of a little change.
“We saw that after seven movies, how can we flip again?” Mancini said. “So this time not by merely changing genre but by changing medium. This will give us a different kind of canvas, a much bigger canvas to explore characters and relationships.”
Much is still to be learned about Child’s Play: The TV Series, but if the backlash received by the next movie’s Chucky reveal is anything to go by, it’s clear that Mancini and Kirschner’s project is the one with the fans on its side.
