Don't get excited by that Tales From The Crypt reboot teaser that's making the rounds. It's not what you think.
About a year ago, word got out that TNT was planning a brand new block of horror programming, using a familiar brand name as the centerpiece. Namely, horror anthology Tales From The Crypt, the legendary 1950s comic book series that achieved greater pop culture immortality as an HBO series in the late '90s.
The plan has been for M. Night Shyamalan to spearhead the series, with conflicting reports as to whether this would be an episodic anthology (like the original) or take on a season long anthology format (ala American Horror Story).
It hasn't been that easy, though, and the network released a statement in January indicating that we might have to wait awhile.
"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."
This echoed what M. Night Shyamalan told us while promoting Split that same month.
"We’re still figuring out the whole rights thing. It’s a very old property and a bazillion people involved with the rights, so working through all that, but I do have three or four different projects that I’m very excited about, so hopefully you’ll be reading about one or two coming up soon."
That "whole rights thing" is probably why Tales From The Crypt hasn't had a Blu-ray release for one thing, but it's certainly holding up the show.
But over the last couple of days, a teaser surfaced on the web, which gave fans hope that maybe the rights issues had been straightened out and that we'd get to see Tales From The Crypt on TNT before the end of the year.
Unfortunately, I can confirm that this isn't the case, the teaser (which features HBO Cryptkeeper John Kassir's distinctive cackle at the end) was only intended for internal use at the network to sell the show to advertisers, and dates back to spring 2016. At the moment, Tales From The Crypt remains in a holding pattern on TNT while those rights issues are worked out.
This can change, of course, but even if it does, that trailer isn't indicative of what we're going to see. Trust me, I want to see a new Tales From The Cryptdone justice as bad as you do, so I'll continue to look for more information on this story as it becomes available.