Posted in: Movies, Recent Updates, TV | Tagged: joe hill, locke and key, tales from the darkside

Locke & Key Feature Film Still Moving Forward – If Fox Agrees To Never Release Its Unaired Pilot

Looks like there are a lot of behind the scenes legal shenanigans keeping an adaptation of Joe Hill's IDW comic series Locke & Key from seeing the light of day, and I'm not sure I understand how all of it works.

Basically, Universal studios and super producers Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman picked up rights to make a movie version of Locke & Key, but are now afraid that Fox TV, which filmed a reportedly excellent pilot but then did not pick it up to series, will release the pilot anyway, thus stealing a lot of thunder from a potential film.

Here's how Hill put it to MTV while being interviewed about the new Tales From the Darkside series he's writing for The CW:

It's been snared in an endless series of contractual negotiations. Universal took a long, long time to come through with an acceptable contract for myself and IDW. Now they're dealing with a bureaucracy as labyrinthine and implacable as their own: FOX TV. Uni wants to avoid spending $25 million on a movie, and then have FOX steal their thunder by releasing a three-year-old pilot. FOX wants to see some coin on all the money they sank into the pilot in the first place. The lawyers all have to validate their salaries.

I'm not entirely sure how Fox thinks it's going to make its money back by releasing the pilot – perhaps via iTunes? But it sounds to me like Universal will have to pay Fox not to release it, and once they have that assurance, the movie version is cleared to go ahead into production.

So there's no timeline on when we may see Locke & Key – any version – yet, but Tales from the Darkside is in very active development, and if it's good, will see 11 to 13 episodes air in the 2014 – 2015 season.

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