Disney Plus is making a live-action Gargoyles series, skeptical question mark?

16.10.2023 - 23:37 / polygon.com / Gary Dauberman

Spend any time talking to Greg Weisman, creator of the 1990s animated series Gargoyles, and a few things are sure to come up: Yes, he’s interested in continuing Gargoyles, which was cut off mid-story, and which maintains a cult following to this day. And yes, he’s open to a live-action version. But Walt Disney Studios, which owns the rights to the show, has been playing around with that idea for decades, and every time it almost gets off the ground, something changes and it gets scuttled.

Now, according to The Hollywood Reporter, a live-action TV series for Disney Plus is actually being written and produced. But take that with a grain of salt — there are a lot of challenges in any new version of Gargoyles, and it’s still very early in the series’ potential development.

According to THR’s report, the newGargoyles is being developed and produced by writer-producer Gary Dauberman, known for his work on the Conjuring horror-movie spin-offs Annabelle, Annabelle: Creation (which he wrote), and Annabelle Comes Home (which he wrote and directed, from a story he developed with The Conjuring director James Wan). Dauberman has been signed as writer, showrunner, and executive producer on the new series. James Wan’s company Atomic Monster would executive produce the show.

The idea of putting a kid-friendly adventure like Gargoyles in the hands of someone best known for bloody, graphic horror movies feels a bit odd: Dauberman also scripted the Conjuring spin-offs The Nun and The Nun II, and the Stephen King adaptations It and It: Chapter Two, directed by Andy Muschietti. But whileGargoyles has the slightest tinge of gothic horror, it isn’t a horror series. Its story, about a species of creatures who sleep in stone form by day and revive as living beings by night, is more of a modern urban fantasy. In the pilot episodes, the gargoyle Goliath and a few of his warrior tribe are put under a spell that keeps them in stone form for a century. They go to sleep in medieval Scotland and wake up a thousand years later in Manhattan in 1994, now in the hands of a man so Machiavellian, there’s an entire trope about airtight schemes named after him.

In the animated series’ original three-season run from 1994 to 1997, Gargoyles took its characters around the world and introduced a wide variety of settings and characters, so there’s plenty of fodder for a series that wouldn’t just be a straight live-action reboot. But Variety also reported on the series in progress, with a summary of the new show that’s so similar to the summary of the old show, it suggests Dauberman is just remaking the animated series. Except that summary suggests all gargoyle characters besides Goliath will be eliminated from the new story:

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