Edgar Wright has revealed that an American production company asked him to develop a Shaun of the Dead television series.
Shaun of the Dead was a huge critical and commercial success for the writer/director and it helped kickstart his Hollywood career as well as the career of its star, Simon Pegg.
For years, fans have been clamouring for a sequel, but both Wright and Pegg are against the idea.
"If I ever do an Instagram Live or whatever, people are always like, 'I need Shaun of the Dead 2 in my life,'" Pegg recalled to The Guardian earlier this year.
"And I'm like, 'No, you don't f-cking need Shaun of the Dead 2! The last thing you need is Shaun of the Dead 2! It's done. Move on!'"
And, we definitely won't be getting an Americanised TV show.
"There have been some conversations about that, yes. We've been quite protective about that," Wright told Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast. "A long time ago, an American company wanted to do a TV series of Shaun of the Dead, based on the film. We were like, 'No!'. Sometimes when these things come up, we take them very seriously. And some things are things we are still talking about."
Wright and Pegg to collaborate again
Wright and Pegg have been friends and collaborators for three decades and wrote the 'Three Cornettos' trilogy together - Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End.
The last of those movies came out in 2013 and since then Pegg and Wright have focused on other projects. For example, Pegg is now a key figure in the Mission: Impossible franchise, while Edgar has written and directed hits like Last Night in Soho and Baby Driver.
The plan is for the pals to get together and write something new, soon, but Pegg says it won't be like anything they've produced before.
"We’ve always done original ideas, even though we’ve kind of built them around existing genres or whatever," the actor told Discussing Film.
"Edgar and I are always talking about what we’re going to do next. Neither of us can believe it’s been 10 years since The World’s End. But because our careers have obviously changed and we’re not just sitting around writing zombie films like we used to, the real problem now is about syncing our diaries up at a time when we can both sit down and write a film. And then obviously shoot it. I’ll say this, it’s not about if but when we will do something, which we will do because we’ve already started talking about it.
"Edgar came over to my house last year and we started kicking ideas around. It’s not going to be another sort of Cornetto film in that those movies were specifically genre riffs, which addressed the idea of the collective versus the individual.
"There are certain kinds of thematic consistencies between those three movies which make them a trilogy – it’s not just the ice cream, it’s a series of connecting thematic details. With what do next, we want to be completely different from that. We don’t want to do a take on action movies or a take on sci-fi or a take on horror. We want to make a movie that is totally its own thing, existing outside of the Cornetto trilogy. My desire, really, is to do something super different."
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