Morgan Creek Rebrand & Reboots Announced!

Deadline Hollywood just posted an exclusive announcement that Morgan Creek is going through a rebranding process and changing its name to Morgan Creek Entertainment Group. Not only that, but it’s preparing to renew their efforts into developing across multiple platforms at least 7 of their properties, including Ace Ventura, Major League, Young Guns, Dead Ringers, Diabolique, Pacific Heights and Clive Barker’s Nightbreed. Whether this means finding new markets for these movies as they are, rebooting them or even developing TV series about them is still up for grabs at this point, but it seems that anything goes as long as there’s interested parties.

 “Morgan Creek’s globally recognized brand and premium titles are an ideal fit for the extraordinary creative revolution taking place in the television and digital worlds today” – MCEG President David Robinson.

Morgan Creek recently developed a movie they had been trying to put out for years about Tupac Shakur, the biopic All Eyez On Me (2017) which unfortunately didn’t make it big on the box office market, and they already started developing another of their properties with the TV show The Exorcist on Fox, currently on its second season. Deadline’s article goes on to mention that other properties are in different stages of development, including Ace Ventura (to be relaunched as a soft reboot new sequel) and Young Guns (for a streaming service), although without the talent of Jim Carrey it’s uncertain how well Ace Ventura will work: I mean, we all remember how the 2003 sequel When Harry Met Lloyd turned out without Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels. But the list goes on to include a reboot of Dead Ringers (they are discussing this idea with a showrunner), and the article quotes Robinson and MCEG head of content Barbara Wall as saying that “David Cronenberg has been supportive of a Dead Ringers reimagining” a surprising revelation I haven’t heard anywhere else yet. Personally I don’t think a Dead Ringers reboot is necessary and in fact I think it’s one of David Cronenberg’s best films, but a reboot doesn’t mean the original film is going anywhere… They also state that it’s important to have the blessing of the original creators for the reboots.

What got me really interested in this article is that they mention the concept for a Nightbreed TV series:

Barker has been involved in the pitch for a Nightbreed TV series

Now if you’ve been following our blog and podcast you’ll know about our sister project the Occupy Midian group on Facebook, the largest Nightbreed community online. There have been many public discussions there and on our own show (check out Episodes #031 and #086) about the attempts at developing a Nightbreed TV series, an idea that started back in 2012 with Clive Barker and Matt Venne, and that in the last few years has been worked extensively based on that first treatment by Michael G. Plumides Jr. (Executive Producer of the Nightbreed Director’s Cut, Ghost Trek previously, on the @BarkerCast) who has kept the buzz flowing over at Occupy Midian over the years, trying to find the right people to develop it with, for Morgan Creek. His current comment about this news is that “We’re all ears – We’d love to develop a Nightbreed TV series.”

Matt Venne / Clive Barker original treatment, 2012.

So there you have it folks. This article seems to be a follow up of the news from 2 years ago, when it was reported that Morgan Creek was selling its library of films, maintaining movies like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Major League, Young Guns, Flying Tigers and The Exorcist franchise as well as the TV rights to their properties. Now it seems their power play is on the move, after producing All Eyez on Me and The Exorcist (Fox), to add value to their library and tap into their properties to maximize their value. We wish them luck, and I wish we can see the Nightbreed property get some new developments in the future, whether on TV or other media.

Stay tuned.