SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK 2 is Trapped in a Messy Rights Nightmare
Fans have been waiting years to see what happens next with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and it sounds like director André Øvredal is just as eager to get the sequel rolling.
The frustrating part is that the movie’s biggest obstacle has nothing to do with scripts, casting, or creative direction. It’s all tied up in a legal situation involving studios that don’t even exist anymore.
Øvredal has carved out a cool career in horror over the years. After breaking out with Troll Hunter in 2010, he followed it up with the creepy and underrated The Autopsy of Jane Doe. But it was 2019’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark that really pushed him into bigger studio territory.
Produced by Guillermo del Toro, the film adapted the beloved nightmare-fuel children’s books written by Alvin Schwartz and illustrated by Stephen Gammell.
Del Toro’s involvement gave the project a lot of extra attention, and even though some critics felt the movie pulled its punches on the horror side, audiences still connected with it thanks to the creepy creature designs, eerie atmosphere, and nostalgia surrounding the books.
A sequel announcement quickly followed in 2020, and things sounded promising for a while. By 2023, Øvredal revealed that a script had already been written and was going through revisions. Then everything suddenly went quiet.
Now we finally know why. Speaking with /Film, Øvredal explained that the sequel has been tangled up in an ugly rights situation caused by the shutdown of two companies involved with the original film, CBS Films and eOne.
He said: “What I can say is that it’s been stuck in a bit of a copyright ownership hell with two studios that don’t exist anymore, that produced a movie together, CBS Films and EOne, and they don’t really exist anymore.
“The rights spread out to two other companies, and then they have to agree to figure it out between them, and that has taken some time, but there is movement.
“We do have conversations about it once every couple of months, and there is currently some movement, I’m gathering. But it becomes about legal departments and not about creatives, because we have a story that I love that is just ready to go whenever somebody decides, ‘I own the movie, let’s go make it.’”
That’s a crappy situation for a filmmaker who clearly still wants to make the movie happen. It sounds like the creative team is basically sitting around with a finished story while lawyers and corporate ownership issues keep the whole thing frozen in place.
The original film had plenty of room to grow into a bigger horror franchise, especially considering how many terrifying stories from Schwartz’s books still haven’t been adapted. Fans were also curious to see where the surviving characters’ story would go next after the setup in the first movie.
In the meantime, Øvredal’s next horror project, Passenger, arrives in theaters on May 22.