Eli Craig says David Zaslav killed a Tucker & Dale vs. Evil TV show

The Clown In A Cornfield director revealed he was close to starting a TV sequel to his 2010 cult favorite when Zaslav pulled the plug.

By William Hughes | May 10, 2025 | 5:52pm

Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine in Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, Photo: Magnet Releasing

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Eli Craig says David Zaslav killed a Tucker & Dale vs. Evil TV show

Eli Craig has been making the rounds of late, promoting his new horror comedy Clown In A Cornfield. (You can read our own conversation with Craig right here.) That, inevitably, has also included a bit of eulogizing of the writer-director’s breakout film, 2010’s Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, including Craig’s many efforts to get some kind of continuation of the well-remembered Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine comedy on screens somewhere. And what studio-commanding villain has most recently blocked those efforts? You guessed it: Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav.

This is per an interview Craig gave to Slashfilm this week, saying that, of the various T&D projects he’s floated in the last 15 years, one of the ones that came closest to actually existing was a TV series, aimed at TNT or TBS. Craig: “It’s always been a struggle. And then when we do set it up, and we get all the pieces together, it gets killed somehow. We almost did a TV show with it that was on TNT/TBS, and you’ll be happy to know that David Zaslav, the slayer of all cinema, came in and put the final nail in the coffin for Tucker And Dale as we were about to go to series, and just cancelled all production.”

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Craig gave a few light details about what the series would have looked like, saying it “Was more like Tucker and Dale, but detectives. Detective Tucker and Dale, like, stupidly trying to figure out what’s happening in a world where they’re always getting it wrong and people are dying around them.” (Which does sound like a pretty funny build off of the movie’s premise, which saw Tudyk and Labine play perfectly normal and nice rural guys surrounded by college students who assume they’re murderous backwoodsmen, and get themselves killed panicking about it.) Craig didn’t specify what objections the studio had for the project, but it feels safe to assume this was in that period in the early 2020s when Zaslav was cementing his control of the newly merged Warner Bros. Discovery with a ton of extremely unpopular cost-cutting measures.

Labine most recently starred on the small screen in NBC’s medical drama New Amsterdam, where he was a regular for five seasons. Tudyk, of course, appears all over the place: Syfy’s Resident Alien comes back for its fourth season in June, and you can hear a couple of sentences from him at the very tail end of this week’s episodes of Andor.