In a year full of exciting movies, October looked to hold a special nostalgic treat for '90s kids with the release of Paramount’s feature film adaptation of the Nickelodeon series Are You Afraid of the Dark? Now it seems that the near two-decade hiatus between meetings of the Midnight Society will be even longer. That’s because Are You Afraid of the Dark? won’t be coming out this year. Take a look:
Are You Afraid of the Dark? was scheduled to be released on October 4, but as you can see from this tweet from BoxOffice, it has now been removed from the calendar entirely. This news was confirmed in an official statement from Paramount saying that Are You Afraid of the Dark will not be releasing on October 4 and is now unset.
That means that the next meeting of the Midnight Society won’t be happening in 2019. Paramount didn’t announce that Are You Afraid of the Dark? has been delayed until next year or a new release date for the film, simply that it is unset. Why this move has been made and when/if we will see the Are You Afraid of the Dark? movie is unclear, but Paramount didn’t say it was cancelled, so there’s hope. As far as that October 4 weekend goes, Joker and The Woman in the Window are still set to open then.
We first heard about the Are You Afraid of the Dark? feature film in November of 2017 when Gary Dauberman, screenwriter of horror flicks like IT Chapter Two and The Nun, was brought on board to write the film for Paramount’s new division Paramount Players. BenDavid Grabinski was also brought on for the most recent drafts of the script.
Then this past December, it was announced that Disturbia director D.J. Caruso was in talks to helm the film. So what happened in the two months since D.J. Caruso was attached to direct Are You Afraid of the Dark? We do not know. Hopefully this is just a case of the film needing to spend some more time in development to get a take that does justice to the 1990s anthology series that so delighted viewers of Nickelodeon’s Saturday night SNICK lineup.
It was only a week and a half ago that Deadline reported that along with reviving All That, Nickelodeon would also be reviving Are You Afraid of the Dark? on the small screen with a new mini-series this October to coincide with the release of the feature film. There's no word as of yet whether that is still the plan or if that series will be held back until whenever the film lands.
According to BoxOffice, some of Paramount’s other titles based on properties with strong millennial nostalgia attached are still on the way, but perhaps not as soon as we thought. A movie based on Clifford the Big Red Dog is set for next November while the Rugrats movie that was in that spot moved back a few months to January of 2021.
We’ll keep you updated on Are You Afraid of the Dark? when we know more about what the future holds for the movie. In the meantime, check out our 2019 release schedule to keep track of what still is (hopefully) coming to theaters this year.
