TNT had some great news for horror fans earlier this year when it announced that a Tales from the Crypt revival was in the works. Early estimates placed the series' premiere as taking place during the fall of 2016, but the show clearly hasn't come together just yet. A rumor recently hit the web that TNT had killed the project due to budget issues with M. Night Shyamalan's production. Well, fear not, boils and ghouls - Tales from the Crypt isn't dead. In fact, TNT has a pretty solid reason for the delay. Here's what the network said in a statement:
The underlying rights to this classic, vintage property are complicated. TNT and others have been pursuing a solution for more than a year, with significant progress being made. We look forward to the potential for further active development of this valuable franchise once the clearance process is fully resolved.
The original Tales from the Crypt ran from the summer of 1989 until the summer of 1996 on HBO. A total of 93 episodes aired, and the combination of dark humor and horror won the series a rabid fanbase that lasts to this day. The show will likely have a built-in audience for at least the early episodes. TNT hasn't given up on a project that could be a huge winner; TNT just hasn't totally secured the rights to produce a Tales from the Crypt revival. All in all, TNT's statement about the delay on Tales from the Crypt is both good news and bad news for fans.
The good news is that we won't only need to rely on old episodes of Tales from the Crypt for our fix of the Crypt Keeper forever. The project is still in the works and no budget issues (as rumored by Bloody Disgusting) have halted progress. The bad news is that there's no saying how much longer we'll have to wait before TNT secures all the necessary rights to the series for its revival. TNT President Kevin Reilly revealed in August that the network was then aiming to debut Tales from the Crypt in the fourth quarter of 2017. We can't say at this point whether that date will need to be pushed back, but at least we know that TNT still plans on producing the project.
Tales from the Crypt is set to make up part of a brand new horror block on TNT. The network also placed an order for a pilot called Time of Death, which would be an anthology series with hour-long episodes that unfold in real time in the span of one fight-filled night. Another horror project in development is Creatures, which revolves around a pair of friends who were driven to bloody extremes in their attempts to reach out to an Internet boogeyman. M. Night Shyamalan has a hand in the development of all three projects for TNT.
Stay tuned to CinemaBlend for the latest news on Tales from the Crypt, and take a look at our midseason TV premiere schedule to see what you can watch on the small screen during the wait for the Crypt Keeper to make his way back to the airwaves.
