Netflix Orders Robert Downey Jr’s Sweet Tooth to Series, Based on Jeff Lemire Comic

Jeff Lemire’s wholesome and horrifying comic series Sweet Tooth has been in development as a television series for a few years now, with none other than Iron Man himself Robert Downey Jr. spearheading the project. Though the series previously had a pilot ordered at Hulu, the adaptation has now apparently moved to their biggest competition as ace scooper Daniel RPK brings word on his Patreon that Sweet Tooth has moved to Netflix. Not only has the series made the jump across town to a different streaming service, the show has reportedly been given a series order though it’s unclear how many episodes that will include.

Sweet Tooth pilot is based on Jeff Lemire‘s Vertigo Comics series of the same name, which ran from 2009 to 2013. The series will center on the coming-of-age fable of Gus, a boy/deer hybrid who leaves home to find the world ravaged by a cataclysmic event. Gus joins forces with a family of hybrids and humans to find answers behind the apocalypse, only to discover a vast conspiracy that forces him to question his very existence.

Hap and Leonard alum Jim Mickle and Arrow‘s Beth Schwartz will co-showrun the series which will be executive produced by RDJ and his wife Susan Downey, plus Amanda Burrell and Linda Moran. Lemire himself previously spoke about the prospect of Sweet Tooth being adapted, previously calling it very complicated in a 2013 interview with CBR, ironically noting that he’d have liked to see a film adaptation over television.

“It’s a tricky question, and I’ll try to answer it in a way that won’t get me in trouble with DC, but when you do a book for Vertigo, the contracts get kind of complicated.” Lemire said. “Warner Bros. controls the properties more than a book that I might have done for, let’s say, Top Shelf. So in terms of being optioned, it’s a lot harder for that to happen because of Vertigo’s contracts than I would like, maybe. There’s a lot of interest, but it’s very complicated so it hasn’t been optioned yet.”

“But yes, I would love to see it adapted.” Lemire continued. “I think maybe more as a movie than a TV show. I think it could be really boiled down to the original idea I had, which was that the first 10 or 11 issues of the series could almost be the whole movie or the whole series. Everything else could be cut out. I just don’t have the luxury of sitting around and thinking about that happening because it’s out of my control, really.”

Sweet Tooth joins a growing roster of comic adaptations on Netflix along with the likes of recent hit Locke & Key and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Umbrella Academy, and Lucifer. Netflix will also release the feature film adaptation of Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernandez’s The Old Guard starring Charlize Theron and Chiwetel Ejiofor. There’s also the many projects from writer Mark Millar, whose Millarworld imprint was acquired by Netflix in 2017 for the purposes of developing his existing properties into shows and films which so far includes Empress, Huck and Sharkey the Bounty Hunter as movies, plus Jupiter’s Legacy and American Jesus as live-action series, and Supercrooks as an animated series.