If you watched Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy and thought, This feels more like a TV show, you’re not alone. For one thing, Vulture agrees. For another, Fear Street director Leigh Janiak sees TV show futures for the franchise. She wants to see the R.L. Stine-iverse expand just like the MCU. Speaking to IndieWire, Janiak said, “One of the things that I talked about before I was hired was that we have a potential here to create a horror Marvel, where you can have slasher killers from lots of different eras.â€
Horror did franchise crossing before it was cool, with the Universal monsters cameoing in each other’s works. What is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, if not the comedy-horror Avengers? And then you have the various universes: Freddy vs. Jason, Alien vs. Predator, Mummy vs. upsetting CGI The Rock. Universal actually tried to do a horror Marvel with the Dark Universe. That idea flopped with the premiere of Tom Cruise’s Star Persona vs. the Conventions of Genre Cinema.
What Fear Street has over Universal is the head start of a trilogy. We already understand the overarching mythos. Janiak already knows what she wants to do next: “I really started getting excited about a ’50s slasher movie,†she said. “It’s just cool to think about the different eras and what’s possible as a horror fan.â€