The popular start-up horror franchise Fear Street could grow exponentially, according to the director of the first three films.
If you’ve been on Netflix of late, you’ve probably noticed the entirety of the recently-released Fear Street trilogy sitting steadfastly in the UK Top Ten list. The three films – shot within six months and released within three weeks of each other – certainly seem to be proving popular with audiences. We’ve seen a lot of studios and franchises try to ape the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s ‘shared universe’ system over the last decade, mostly without success. But the horror trilogy’s director, Leigh Janiak, believes that the Fear Street franchise is set up perfectly to replicate Marvel’s success.
As she puts it, “one of the exciting things about Fear Street is the fact that the universe is big and allows for a lot of space. One of the things that I talked about before I was hired was that we have a potential here to create a horror Marvel [Cinematic Universe], where you can have slasher killers from lots of different eras. You have the canon of our main mythology that’s built around the fact that the devil lives in Shadyside, so there’s also room for everything else.”
Netflix certainly wouldn’t turn down the chance to create a franchise with similar optics and brand-awareness as the Marvel films, as despite its policy of releasing a film every week this year, it’s debatable just how much their movies are ‘crossing over’ into the public consciousness. Cannes director Thierry Freemaux recently criticised the streaming platform for not creating any significant directors, despite its massive output.
For Janiak though, she seems intrigued by the idea of an interconnected universe of Fear Street movies that could transcend what movies are, stating “I think that my hope is that audiences like it enough that we can start building out [more], we can think about what another trilogy would be, what standalones would be, what TV would be. I don’t even think about it like TV or movies exactly anymore. That’s the great thing about Netflix and about what Fear Street is, which is kind of a hybrid new thing. I’m excited about the possibility of what else can happen. I really started getting excited about a ’50s slasher movie, which I haven’t really seen and what that means. It’s just cool to think about the different eras and what’s possible as a horror fan”.
It’s an ambitious idea and Netflix is nothing if not ambitious. With lots and lots more source books in the Fear Street series from author RL Stine, there’s certainly plenty of material to draw from. You can catch the Fear Street trilogy streaming on Netflix right now.
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