Tucker & Dale Director Blames David Zaslav for Killing TV Spinoff

The 15-year anniversary of Tucker & Dale vs. Evil was earlier in January, and if you’ve been holding out hope for a follow up, director/co-writer Eli Craig revealed it almost happened.

During an interview with Slashfilm about his new horror flick Clown in a Cornfield, Craig noted the would-be sequel “has died more deaths than the college kids [in the first movie]. It’s always been a struggle, and then when we do set it up and get all the pieces together, it gets killed somehow.” One such version was a TV continuation on TNT/TBS (not unlike what happened with Chucky), but that ran into its own roadblock: namely, current Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav.

“Zaslav, the slayer of all cinema, came in and put the final nail in the coffin for Tucker & Dale as we were about to go to series, and just canceled all production, ” said Craig. That, in and of itself doesn’t sound too surprising: presumably, this would’ve taken place sometime in 2022, shortly after WB and Discovery merged and the company went about laying off staff and junking various projects in the name of tax write offs. (Despite this, some projects have survived.)

As for what the proposed show would’ve been, Craig said the titular hillbillies, played again by Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine, would’ve been detectives “stupidly trying to figure out what’s happening in a world where they’re always getting it wrong and people are dying around them.” While that idea may be done for, Craig said he’ll always want to make a sequel to his feature film debut. “It’s set up for it, and when I wrote it, there were these elements I wanted to follow,” he said. “Hollywood is a slayer of great ideas, but stay alive, fans! Because there’s always a possibility.”

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