It’s been nearly 20 years since Hollywood evoked the Candyman, but his hiatus will soon come to an end!
Jordan Peele is producing a Candyman reboot via his Monkeypaw Productions; Nia DaCosta (Little Woods) will direct this project, and now? We may have a star.
Variety is reporting that Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is in talks to lead the reboot in the titular role. The Aquaman villain already has a big part in Peele’s next directorial effort, Us, and is also in Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen cast at HBO.
The rights for the Candyman franchise – originally held by the now-defunct PolyGram Filmed Entertainment and distributed by Tri-Star – became available quite recently, and Peele snapped them up. The comedian-turned director has parlayed success from horror thriller Get Out – which earned him three Oscar nods and a Best Original Screenplay win – into a genre run (amongst several other projects,) that continues with his 2019-scheduled horror film, Us, and television projects in Lovecraft Country and a miniseries reboot of The Twilight Zone.
The original 1992 movie – written and directed by Bernard Rose, based on Clive Barker’s short story, The Forbidden – starred Tony Todd as the titular hook-handed boogeyman who spits bees and haunts a housing project in Chicago. This reboot is set to “return to the neighbourhood where the legend began: the now-gentrified section of Chicago where the Cabrini-Green housing projects once stood.”
The original movie’s twist on Barker’s white-and-blonde boogeyman added a socio-political layer to the film, reinventing the killer as an African American who was lynched back in 1890, suffering a severed hand before being smothered with honey and stung to death by bees.
Candyman was not a runaway box office success and yielded about $25.8 its domestic-only release. However, it became successful enough to yield a theatrically-released sequel in 1995’s Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh, which only grossed $13.9 million, leading to its final entry, the 1999 straight-to-video sequel, Candyman: Day of the Dead.
If you really want to see the Candyman make a comeback, say his name five times in front of a mirror and hope for the best.