Something Is Killing the Children is heading to live-action. The comic, one of the biggest hottest books on the market right now, is being adapted by Trevor Macy and Mike Flanagan. The filmmakers were most recently behind Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep adaptation, and they also created The Haunting of Hill House for Netflix.
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The initial report from THR suggests Something Is Killing the Children is being developed as a series at Netflix. As of now, it appears Netflix only has a pilot in development, a rare move to the streamer that typically pushes as orders straight-to-series. It’s said Macy is writing and will become showrunner should Netflix give the show an official greenlight, and it’s unclear if Flanagan will direct any of the episodes.
Both Macy and Flanagan are listed as executive producers on the project alongside Boom!’s Stephen Christy, Ross Richie, and Mark Ambrose. James Tynion IV and Werther Dell’Edera — the creators behind the comic — are listed as co-executive producers on the project.
Something Is Killing the Children has become a runaway hit for Boom!, with the debut issue selling over 175,000 issues over a handful of printings. Since its launch, the book has moved around 1.2 million copies through its various issues. It also won an Eisner for Best New Series at the 2020 Eisner Awards.
“SOMETHING IS KILLING THE CHILDREN is a project that has been living in my head for a long, long time. It’s shifted and changed in different ways at different moments, but ultimately I think this was the form it was always MEANT to take. There are horrifying things in the world that are only really visible to the young—unique societal pressures and terrors, monsters, unshaped creatures of fear and horror that prey on children—and much as we try to protect them, we fail, over and over again,” Tynion said of the project when it was first announced in 2019. “This is a very grounded human story about very grounded human fears that take a more literal, horrifying shape. And then there’s Erica Slaughter. She kills the monsters the other adults can’t see. I am very excited for all of you to enter the world Werther and I have created, so you can meet her.”
