Hollywood has been facing accusations that the creative well has been running dry for decades, and while it’s certainly true to a large extent, the recent reveal of the first trailer for Most Dangerous Game: New York neatly boils the idea down to its very essence.
While TV shows get renewed all the time – and plenty of them don’t as Netflix subscribers will be fully aware – the history behind Christoph Waltz returning as Miles Sellars to terrorize The Umbrella Academy star David Castañeda has origins that could generously be described as complex.
The Dangerous Game was the most recent adaptation of Richard Connell’s short story, which has already been brought to the screen or served as the inspiration for dozens upon dozens of movies, episodic projects, radio serials, comic books, video games, and even more besides.
The 15-episode first run aired on the doomed streaming service Quibi, but when the short-form platform went boom in spectacularly embarrassing fashion, Roku stepped in to develop another batch of episodes. Meanwhile, Amazon secured the rights to distributed Most Dangerous Game as a 127-minute feature film, which ended up proving mighty popular among viewers.
Effectively, what we have here is the second season of a TV series from a failed streamer that’s been revived by another company, albeit one that’s already been re-edited and re-released as an easily-digestible film that’s previously experienced an unexpected second wave of popularity on yet another different on-demand outfit, which is a neat summation of how no marketable IP is ever truly allowed to burn out.