With today’s news that Reginald the Vampire has been cancelled after two seasons at Syfy, the horror hive mind immediately shared one thought: what about that other Syfy horror comedy? You know, the one starring one of the genre’s shortest (yet most-feared) and most-merchandized villains? As of now, there’s no word yet on a season four, Chucky fans.
As Deadline reports, Reginald the Vampire—starring Spider-Man sidekick Jacob Batalon as a misfit bloodsucker—won’t be returning, further shaking things up at Syfy, where Alan Tudyk’s fan-beloved Resident Alien just shifted from Syfy to USA for its upcoming fourth season. Syfy will see the return of another horror comedy—SurrealEstate, a Canadian co-production, for a third season—and it has a horror mystery series called Revival, a comic book adaptation, on the way. But a fourth season of Chucky, a co-production of Syfy and USA, “is still TBD,” according to the trade.
While no show since Supernatural ended can ever assume it’ll be returning season after season, Chucky feels like a no-brainer on a few important levels. The reviews have been solid (season three currently has a 100% positive score on Rotten Tomatoes), and the show has a built-in appeal based on Chucky’s status as a horror icon going back nearly four decades. But even more importantly perhaps, the show is a standout example of a movie franchise being expanded into a series; over four seasons, creator Don Mancini has done an admirable job incorporating familiar Chucky characters from the film series (including Jennifer Tilly as a bonkers version of “Jennifer Tilly, possessed by Tiffany the killer doll,” as well as former child actor Alex Vincent, reprising his role from the 1988 Child’s Play) with new characters, including a trio of high school kids who become Chucky’s next-generation nemeses.
Season three, which unfurled in two sections thanks to the 2023 Hollywood strikes, also added a timely bent to its usual blend of campy humor, refreshingly well-integrated queer themes, and gleeful gore; we saw Chucky (voiced by movie stalwart Brad Dourif) infiltrate the White House by way of the First Family itself. Sure, it was part of a desperate scheme to re-set the sinister spell that gives him immortal life, but it was still a clever way to tap into America’s growing unease about the upcoming election. Season three also ended on a hell of a cliffhanger—trapping Chucky’s teenage foes in doll bodies—as well as what felt like a new start for Chucky and Tiffany, but with plenty of dangling threads (what about their kid, GiGi?) left to explore.
If the worst happens, and Syfy and USA decide there’s no more room for Chucky, horror fans know Mancini won’t let his star character languish on the shelf for long. Speaking to io9 earlier this year, the horror creator (who’s famously no fan of the in-name-only 2019 Child’s Play movie) shared a tiny bit about his hopes for Chucky’s big-screen return. “It’s like very early days of of talks, but it’s an exciting, exciting enterprise,” he said. “I hope we’re going to get another season of the show as well [as a new movie]. I mean, I think both can occur and they can both coexist in there. My plan is to have it all make sense in terms of the continuity and the overall mythology of the world we’re building; we won’t contradict anything.”
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