In what has, sadly, not turned out to be an adaptation of our beloved fanfic What We Think It’d Be Like If You Managed To Get Casper The Friendly Ghost’s Skin And Bones Back In Him, Deadline is reporting that Steven Spielberg is taking a shot at bringing the classic comic character back to “life.” Specifically, Spielberg (who served as an executive producer on the 1995 film version of the franchise) is working with Goosebumps producers Rob Letterman and Hilary Winston on a new live-action version of the character, to star in a Disney+ streaming TV show.
You’d be right in thinking that no one’s done much with Casper in a hot minute; the film (directed by Brad Silberling and starring Christina Ricci and the voice of Malachi Pearson) kicked off a little sub-franchise of TV shows and direct-to-video films in the ’90s, but the last time the amicable wraith had a regular presence on TV was in 2012, with Canadian animated series Casper’s Scare School. He has, in other words, missed out on a whole culture shift of taking objectively dorky comic book properties like Archie and Sabrina The Teenage Witch and trying to make something cooler and darker with them, but never fear: Deadline notes that the new pitch for a Casper TV series may intend to Wednesday the character up.
Letterman and Winston are the main creative architects here, with the pair writing the new series, while Letterman is set to direct. (Spielberg will be an executive producer, presumably because he still has the rights.) The project landed at Disney+ after what’s being described as a “very competitive” five-way bidding war; the next time studio executives try to present themselves as serious people, remind yourself that their jobs involve figuring out how many millions of dollars to pay for a grimdark version of Casper The Friendly Ghost. The series is now under a “premium development deal” and is being produced at Universal Studio Group.
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