Guillermo del Toro is nothing if not persistent, whether it’s trying and trying again with At the Mountains of Madness or turning his rejected TV show “The Strain” into a successful book (and then a TV show again), and now Heat Vision reports he’s reviving another lost project, A Killing on Carnival Row, as a series for Amazon, titled simply “Carnival Row.”
His Pacific Rim co-writer Travis Beacham made a name for himself in 2005 with his first spec script, in which a detective investigates a series of murders in a city where faeries and other mythical creatures co-exist with humans. New Line purchased the rights, and while del Toro flirted with A Killing on Carnival Row before moving on to murdering his own faeries in Pan’s Labyrinth, other visionaries like Neil Jordan and Tarsem Singh took a swing at it before the rights reverted back to Beacham.
Legendary, which has been del Toro’s home on both the Pac Rim movies and his upcoming Crimson Peak, purchased the property for the helmer, who will co-write the pilot with Beacham and Rene Echevarria (“Terra Nova”). As with FX’s hit “The Strain,” “Carnival Row” will be executive produced by del Toro and Gary Ungar.
“We tried to do it for so long as a film that the rights reverted back to Travis as a basic story,” del Toro said. “And I’ve always talked about it to anyone that would listen. We always had too many ideas to fit into the feature. We can now really focus on the world and the politics of what it is to be a magical being in Victorian steampunk atmosphere where you are seen as a lesser being.”
Del Toro is expected to direct the Amazon pilot before diving deep into Pacific Rim 2, which has an April 7, 2017 release date. Crimson Peak will be released by Warner Bros. on October 16 of this year.
