Warner Bros. is prepping a movie reboot of the 1980s vampire hit The Lost Boys, but that suggests a long in development CW TV series is no more. In today’s Hollywood, studios love nothing more than an existing intellectual property that they can try to revitalize for a new audience. It leads to cries from many about Hollywood having no more original ideas, but it’s not hard to get the appeal. When a brand name has a built-in audience, chances are a lot of that audience is almost guaranteed to check out the new product.
The most common example of that is sequels, which is actually a tack already tried twice before with The Lost Boys. 2008 saw the release of Lost Boys: The Tribe, a sequel to the original that brought back a few of the same characters, and even cast Angus Sutherland as a counterpart of his brother Kiefer Sutherland’s vampire character David. In 2010, The Tribe got its own sequel in Lost Boys: The Thirst. Both went straight to video, and neither appeared to make much of an impression on many people either way.
Clearly, Warner Bros. sees The Lost Boys, which arguably epitomizes late-1980s cool, as a property still in need of a reboot done right. But now that a new Lost Boys remake/reimagining is officially happening, there’s probably no room left for a Lost Boys TV show that’s been in some form of development since 2016.
![The Lost Boys Movie News Suggests The CW Series May Be Dead](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Lost-Boys-Movie-Poster.jpg)
During that year, The CW teamed up with Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas to develop, write, and produce a TV series adaptation of The Lost Boys. Thomas had big plans for his version of The Lost Boys, pitching it as a seven-season anthology in which each season chronicled a full decade of time in the characters’ lives. When that pitch didn’t go to pilot, the project was reworked into a more direct remake of the movie. A pilot for this version happened in 2019, but The CW passed on it, planning to shoot a new version in 2020, but the Coronavirus pandemic got in the way, and the unfinished pilot was passed on as well.
With The Lost Boys now headed back to the big screen, there’s no real reason for the TV show to still be in the cards. It’s not unheard of for a franchise to have two separate continuities operating at once, or even for one of those to be in movies and one on TV – for example, Hellraiser’s new HBO TV show means it will soon join that group – but after all the turmoil it’s gone through only to still end up unmade, The CW probably feels like dedicating resources to The Lost Boys TV show idea instead of devoting them to the movie would be wasteful at this point. If the movie takes off, perhaps a TV show could follow that expands the franchise, but trying to do both at the same time seems like a recipe for failure.