HBO will create a TV series based on Canadian director David Cronenberg’s film of the same name, CBC News has confirmed.
Cronenberg will produce the new project, while Black Mirror writer William Bridges will serve as scriptwriter, showrunner and executive producer, and Lovecraft Country director Yann Demange will both direct and executive produce.
The series will be based in the world of Cronenberg’s 1981 horror/sci-fi project Scanners, though “focus on two women living on the fringes of modern society who are pursued by relentless agents with unimaginable powers and thus must learn to work together to topple a vast conspiracy determined to bring them to heel,” according to The Hollywood Reporter, who first broke news of the series.
The original film followed a group of telepathic and telekinetic men and women called “scanners” in their fight against another rogue scanner. It is credited with introducing Cronenberg’s distinctive technique of “body horror” to wider audiences, and quickly became a cult favourite. Cronenberg most recently debuted another film, Crimes of the Future, earlier this year.
Shortly after, he told news outlet Deadline that another film — The Shrouds, starring Léa Seydoux and Vincent Cassel — is currently in pre-production, with plans to shoot in Toronto in early 2023.
Rights for the Scanners adaptation were first acquired by Media Res and Bron Studios in 2017 through a bidding war, after being held by The Weinstein Company’s Dimension Films for nearly a decade. Dimension attempted to develop a Scanners series of its own in 2011, though it was never released.
The upcoming series will be a co-production between HBO, Wayward Films and Media Res.
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