The new Fantasy Island show—not last year's flop movie—is getting a second season

It took some doing, but Fox has finally found a Fantasy Island revival that works

By Sam Barsanti  |  November 4, 2021 | 10:48pm
Aux News Fantasy Island
The new Fantasy Island show—not last year's flop movie—is getting a second season
Fantasy Island Photo: Miller Mobley/FOX

It took a few tries, but the Fantasy Island brand seems to have finally stuck another landing. The original series ran in the ‘70s and ‘80s, was briefly brought back by ABC in the ‘90s, and then resurrected just last summer for a Blumhouse movie that made its “learn a lesson about yourself by having your wildest fantasies come true” scary. Or at least ostensibly scary. It had Maggie Q and Lucy Hale and Michael Peña, but it wasn’t very good.

This summer, before the dust had even settled on the movie reboot, Fox launched its own Fantasy Island with Roselyn Sánchez starring as a descendent of Ricardo Montalbán’s original boss Mr. Roarke, and against all odds… it actually worked. Fantasy Island was the highest-rated new scripted show of the summer and Fox’s most-streamed show since the surprisingly popular 9-1-1: Lone Star. Now, for the first time since the ‘70s, a Fantasy Island thing is actually going to continue.

That’s from Deadline, which says Fox has ordered a second season of Fantasy Island, but the show is so big that Fox isn’t just going to wait until next summer to do more Fantasy Island-ing. Instead, a two-hour holiday special called “Welcome To The Snow Globe” will air on December 21, featuring Lindsay Craft, Eddie Cahill, and Mackenzie Astin as guest stars. The story involves a businesswoman having a fantasy of “a perfect Christmas” and some kind of new Secret Santa drama on the island. Why didn’t the bad horror movie do a Secret Santa storyline?

Fox’s Fantasy Island is led by showrunner Liz Craft and Sarah Fain, and in addition to Sánchez, it stars Kiara Barnes and John Gabriel Rodriquez. The actual second season presumably will air next summer at some point. The bad movie probably won’t get a sequel.

 
Join the discussion...