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Two major names in the creature feature business, Gary Dauberman and James Wan’s Atomic Monster banner, known for their collaborations on the hit Annabelle horror movies, have teamed up to remake the 1990s cartoon as a live-action series for Disney+.
Dauberman will write, executive produce and showrun the series with Atomic Monster, the company run by Wan and Michael Clear, joining the executive producing ranks.
Dauberman wrote Annabelle, Annabelle: Creation and Annabelle Comes Homes, which were produced by Atomic Monster and are an integral part of Wan’s The Conjuring Universe, the highest-grossing horror franchise of all time. He also penned Conjuring spinoff The Nun.
The partnership has been fruitful not only because of the box office success, but also professionally, as Dauberman moved from behind the typewriter to behind the camera, making his directorial debut Annabelle Comes Home.
And the two also worked together on Swamp Thing, the short-lived series based on the DC character that streamed on the now-defunct DC Universe platform.
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I’m honestly pretty tired of the live-action reboot trend. It feels like Hollywood has never got over the notion that anything animated must be for kids, and adults will only watch live-action productions.
Having said that, it sounds like Dauberman has had a number of productions by Atomic Monster, so I wouldn’t expect much friction between the two parties, which probably means a pretty low drama production cycle. On top of that it sounds like they are a team who is very comfortable working with the horror genre, so hopefully this bodes well for Gargoyles fans.
Hopefully it will feature Michael Dorn
Adapting a Disney Afternoon fantasy/action show into live-action horror is certainly a choice. At least, I’m assuming it’s horror based on the CVs of everyone involved. They’re certainly talented, but I loved Gargoyles as a kid and I think I’ll feel that this is a significant distortion of the original work. Still, I’m not going to actually judge it until I’ve seen it.
Dude, Gargoyles got fucking dark. It had some comedy, but its overarching narrative was straight up tragedy in the theatrical sense.
It was Shakespearean in some of that tragedy, honestly, to the extent that there are quite a few references to Shakespeare’s works in the show (one of the main characters being named Puck, having the Weird Sisters and Macbeth as actual living characters in the story, etc.).
So take all that, the massive sense of grief felt by each of the main characters, the psychological manipulation that Xanatos loves to engage in, Demona’s dark (and sometimes quite horrifying) sorcery, and just the general sense of these being literal monsters who look like demons in a world that fears them, and you have a great setup for horror.
That plus the curse of being turned to stone every day. I imagine it’s not particularly pleasant either. Doing that in live-action? There’s no way to make that not horrific.
If any '90s Disney animated series could fit within the horror genre, it’s Gargoyles. It’s already halfway there. Well, the first two seasons, at least. Third one was basically a different show with most of the original team having zero involvement and wasn’t even intended to exist but Disney thought they’d milk the franchise (and failed miserably).
I honestly couldn’t see a live-action adaptation being at all faithful if didn’t have elements of horror.
Plus, James Wan did the Aquaman movies, so it’s not like he’s restricted to super dark horror elements. It’s just something these two tend to prefer.
And quite a lot of their stuff leans into the psychological element of horror (rather than just focusing on the jumpy scary bits), which is what I’d expect the focus to be when it comes to Gargoyles.
Only other person I could see doing the show justice is Guillermo del Toro.
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Almost 30 years after first appearing as an animated television series, Gargoyles is taking flight once more, this time in live-action.
Two major names in the creature feature business, Gary Dauberman and James Wan’s Atomic Monster banner, known for their collaborations on the hit Annabelle horror movies, have teamed up to remake the 1990s cartoon as a live-action series for Disney+.
Once in the Big Apple, the statues awaken from a thousand-year-old spell and take on the mantle of protecting the city, becoming, as the show’s narration gravely said, “stone by day, warriors by night.”
While Disney hasn’t overtly tried to adapt the series into other formats, it did try to develop a gargoyles-in-modern-times feature in 2010 around the same time it made The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
The partnership has been fruitful not only because of the box office success, but also professionally, as Dauberman moved from behind the typewriter to behind the camera, making his directorial debut Annabelle Comes Home.
Dauberman, repped by CAA, Industry Entertainment, and Felker Toczek, has continued to be one of the top horror talents in town, penning the two-part adaptation of Stephen King’ It.
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