Kevin Smith Reflects on Cancelled Disney+ Series Kingdom Keepers

Many moons ago, before The Walt Disney Company even knew that they’d be calling their streaming service Disney+, none other than Kevin Smith was developing a show for the service that would be probably been the biggest thing of his career. The project that was in the works was Kingdom Keepers, a TV adaptation of the novel series that focused on characters coming to life in the Disney parks at night and battling the various villains of Disney lore. Smith has previously opened up about the reasons why the project didn’t end up happening, but speaking on his latest FatMan Beyond LIVE he talked at length about how far along it went and why it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing that it didn’t get made.

Lamenting with his co-host Marc Bernardin, who had just spun a tale about a project that was worked on at length which ended up not happening, Smith added: “In the beginning when they were still birthing the ideas of Disney+, before it even had a name and stuff, the Disney Channel was in charge of all the programming. Then they put this other dude (in charge), I forget his name, but he was the guy that was like ‘Let’s do Marvel shows, let’s do this.’ And he was the dude that killed our show. And the word I heard back was that dude was like ‘This property has way too much IP in it. He’s got every f-cking Disney character alive,’ because that’s what we were developing. The book kind of is about kids that go into Disney after dark and the park comes to life and sh-t like that. Real fun, fantasy stuff.”

He added, “I met with producers, they took me to Disney after dark and we talked about the logistics of how we would shoot the park sequences during the day,” revealing that he walked through rides like Space Mountain with the lights on.

“It was crazy and the whole time I was working on this thing I was like ‘I can’t believe I got this job. Sooner or later this is going to stop. No way this happens,’” Smith noted. “They brought me to Disney to the lot and showed me the volume, The Mandalorian wall, even before Mandalorian happened. I remember I took video with my own camera (of it). At that point when I met producers and they showed me the volume and talked logistics, that’s when I was like ‘This show might actually f-cking happen.’ But then killed, just instantly. Dude who was hired was like ‘Pull the f-cking plug.’ I don’t bear any ill-will I was like ‘It’s all their property.’ I didn’t come to them like ‘This is my baby,’ they came to me….At the end of the day I was like ‘Oh, it’s over now.’….All that work belongs to them and they’re like ‘It’s gonna go on a shelf and nobody will ever see it or deal with it’ and there is a moment of like ‘Well, was that a waste of time? Did I just waste all my time?’”

To his credit, when that one didn’t work, another iron in the fire panned out as Netflix’s Masters of the Universe: Revelation is gearing up to drop its second batch of episodes later this year.