It was about a year and a half ago that Universal Pictures  acquired the rights to author Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series of novels, with the hopes of bringing the vampire Lestat and his immortal cohorts to un-life again on the big screen.
The first, and arguably best known, of Rice’s novels is 1976’s Interview with the Vampire, which Warner Bros. made into a successful film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in 1994. A semi-sequel, The Queen of the Damned, was made in 2002 with none of the first film’s stars, half the budget, and almost no fidelity to the source material. It died quickly at the box office, seemingly killing this franchise off for good.
But you can’t keep a legendary vampire down for long, and now it seems that writer/director Josh Boone, best known for the The Fault in Our Stars and the upcoming X-Men spin-off New Mutants, has completed a new draft of a Vampire Chronicles big screen reboot. He posted a picture on Instagram of the cover page of the script, which he co-wrote with writer Jill Killington (All We Had, Loiter Squad). You can see Boone’s post down below:
What’s interesting is that this isn’t going to simply be a straight-up remake of Interview with the Vampire;Â the cover page says that the new film will be a combination of Interview and the sequel novel, The Vampire Lestat. The second book in the cycle was totally ignored before, as Warner Bros skipped that book and went straight for book three, The Queen of the Damned. It all ended up not making any sense as a result.
Combining the first two books seems like a smart move, and keeps this from being just another remake. And this tactic has been done before—Elton John made a short lived musical called Lestat a decade ago, which combined both books into one cohesive story. The music from that show was pretty forgettable, but the play proved that the structure of combining both novels into one story worked.
Universal has yet to give the actual full greenlight to Interview with the Vampire, but hopefully Boone’s post means good news is forthcoming.
What do you think of the potential return of the Vampire Lestat? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Images: Warner Bros.
