You can stop shaking and trying to pop that vein in your head. After years of development hell, the right team has finally come together to make a Scanners series at HBO. It’s been a long, winding road for the cult horror film that too many reduce to its memetic image of a bespectacled scanner’s head blowing up in glorious, gory detail. It’s what happens when you shoot a gelatin head with a shotgun round filled with kosher salt. The first attempt came in 2007, when Darren Lynn Bousman was meant to reboot it, but it fell through because David Cronenberg didn’t give his blessing (and they wouldn’t more forward without it).
Dimension Films announced they’d make a TV version with Alexandre Aja in 2011, but even less is known about how that fell apart.
Now, the pieces have fallen into place with Cronenberg’s blessing and his guidance as an executive producer. The HBO series will be written by Emmy-winning William Bridges, who co-wrote the “USS Callister” of Black Mirror and created the sci-fi romance Soulmates. Yann Demange, who directed ’71 and the pilot for Lovecraft Country, will direct this new vision of warring telepaths.
This is one of those sacred treasures that is ripe for adaptation, especially since it’s shifting to longform instead of being rebooted as a film. It has stark cultural resonance, a biting satirical edge that can work wonders here in 2022, and the personnel involved (especially HBO and production house Media Res) offer hope that it’s being taken as seriously as possible.
Hopefully, this time it doesn’t fall through.
(via The Hollywood Reporter)
