The Walking Dead Creator Robert Kirkman Rebooting The Mole People

The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman’s next project has surfaced at Universal Pictures. Kirkman will produce a remake of Universal’s 1956 sci-fi monster movie The Mole People with his Skybound Entertainment co-founder Dave Alpert, bringing the “monsters from a lost age” back into the light. The upcoming reboot revealed today comes as the studio readies the Kirkman and Alpert-produced Renfield (in theaters April 14th), a modern horror-comedy twist on Universal’s Classic Monsters that stars Nicolas Cage as the legendary Count Dracula. Deadline first reported the news of Kirkman’s Mole People.

Moonshot and Wyrm director Christopher Winterbauer will write the script after pitching his revamp of the B-movie to the studio. The logline states: “A woman travels to a town veiled in a conspiracy to rescue her grandchildren from their father. To do this, she must fight through hell in the underground tunnels where the Mole People reside.”

The original Mole People follows archaeologists who unearth a 3,000-year-old underground civilization. In the caverns of the ancient, long-buried city of the Sumerian albinos dwelling within the depths of the earth, the outsiders encounter the head priest Elinu and his enslaved race of mutant humanoid mole people. John Agar, Cynthia Patrick, Hugh Beaumont, Nestor Paiva, and Alan Napier starred.

Kirkman and Alpert are producing for Skybound, behind AMC’s live-action Walking Dead Universe of shows, Amazon’s adult animated superhero series Invincible, and Cinemax’s Outcast series, all adapted from Kirkman’s Image Comics series. Holly Goline, once the executive in charge of the short-lived Dark Universe for Universal, is overseeing the project for the studio along with Jay Polidoro and Matt Reilly.

Previously, Kirkman’s Skybound set a live-action adaptation of his violent superhero comic book Invincible at Universal, with The Boys and animated Invincible executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg attached to the project. Kirkman told ComicBook in January that Skybound is “very much still working on” the live-action Invincible movie. 

“Sometimes movies take a little bit longer. I think it’s safe to say, if anything, the show has just helped that immensely,” Kirkman said. “People are very excited about that movie potential at Universal. So we’re riding that excitement and trying to push things forward as quickly as possible.”