The Spiderwick Chronicles has revealed its first castings for the Disney+ series based on the popular book series. It was announced earlier this year that Disney will be rebooting the fantasy franchise, but at the time, there was very little released about the show and its potential cast. According to a new report by Deadline, Lyon Daniels and Noah Cottrell will be playing the twin leads of the story, Jared and Simon, while Christian Slater will be taking on the main antagonist role of Dr. Dorian Brauer/Mulgarath.
The Spiderwick Chronicles was previously adapted into a movie in 2008, which starred Freddie Highmore in the dual role of Jared and Simon, but the film didn’t do particularly well at the box office despite being well reviewed by many critics and audiences. One of the biggest issues facing the movie was trying to tell the story in a relatively short runtime, something that long-form series will not have an issue with.
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The Spiderwick Chronicles production team includes She-Hulk director Kat Coiro, who will helm the first two episodes of the show, Aron Eli Coleite, who acts as showrunner, and producers including Jeremy Bell, D.J. Goldberg, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Julie Kane Ritsch. The series is based on the stories of writing duo Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, which consists of five original books and a three-novel spin-off series, that tell the tale of the Grace family, who, on moving to an ancient ancestral home, find their family has been involved in a secret and dangerous faerie universe that exists in parallel to their own.
Disney Is Revisiting Several Franchises That Had Lackluster Movie Adaptations
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The Spiderwick Chronicles’ movie adaptation in 2008 may have been a decent film, but there were plenty of fans of the books who felt there was much missing from the plot. The same can be said of several other movie adaptations of book series that Disney is now looking to bring to the small screen in a way that provides fans with exactly what they want.
As well as The Spiderwick Chronicles, Disney is deep in filming on the first season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which is based on the popular young adult series of books by Rick Riordan that began with Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. That book, and its sequel, were previously made into films that were disowned by Riordan and were poorly reviewed. This time around, the series has Riordan’s full involvement, and fans of the books are looking forward to seeing them realized in a more faithful way.
The same can also be said for Eragon, the first book in The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini. Critics roundly panned a 2006 movie adaptation, and despite doing reasonably well at the box office, the planned sequels were canceled by 20th Century Fox. Now, with the rights being under Disney’s control and a fan campaign for the House of Mouse to give the story the telling it deserves constantly circling social media platforms, Eragon is another fantasy series that will be coming to Disney+ in the next few years.
