Fear Street Part 4 on the way
The Fear Street trilogy couldn’t have gone any better for Netflix, as the recent unusual combination of movies and TV – three films released weekly, like TV episodes – proved to be a big crossover smash hit, with marketing boldly touting them to be “the movie event of the summer.” It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the most recent information indicates that the streaming behemoth is already working on a second trilogy in the property.
According to Small Screen, “a source close to Netflix” has informed them that the studio is knee-deep in Fear Street Part 4 and is also producing two further films to follow it, which will be combined to make another trio of films.
Small Screen claims that these films will bring the timeline closer to the present. Scripts for Fear Street Part 4 and beyond are already in the works. Netflix intends to produce another trilogy, with the new movie taking place in the present day.
It’s too early for casting news, but Small Screen reports that a source informed them “it’s looking probable” that filmmaker Leigh Janiak would return to direct this trilogy, as she did the previous three.
Claims made above are more likely to happen as filmmaker Leigh Janiak has recently revealed, in an interview with Indiewire, that she hopes that the current Free Street trilogy (now streaming on Netflix) can act as a base for an entire franchise that she describes as Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) of horror. She wishes to use R.L. Stine’s string of seventeen books comprising over 150 stories as the basis of this MCU of horror.
“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…”
Roots of Fear Street
The Fear Street trilogy is largely based on Goosebumps author R.L. Stine’s original teen horror novels, however, Netflix reinvented the IP for a more mature audience, including a startling amount of gore and shocks that brought the films closer to the Scream franchise than many expected. If they want to borrow additional ideas from Stine’s work, the author wrote a ton of Fear Street titles – well over 100 in total – from the initial wave in 1989 to the Fear Street Nights trilogy in 2005. They’ve sold more than 80 million copies globally.
So there’s a good chance Netflix will continue to release these trilogies on an annual basis, maybe treating each trilogy as a TV season. But, for the time being, we’re hearing that the second batch of Fear Street movies is on the way.
