James Wan Is Giving The Munsters A Dark Reboot

This year marks the 60th anniversary of The Munsters, a TV series that had higher ratings than The Addams Family when both shows shared the airwaves. However, The Munsters haven’t quite been able to recapture the charm of the original series since it went off the air in 1966 despite numerous attempts to reboot the show. Now, James Wan is going to try his hand at new version of The Munsters that embraces horror over comedy.

Via Deadline, Wan, Lindsey Anderson Beer, and Ingrid Bisu are developing The Munsters’ dark reboot for Universal Content Productions, a division of NBCUniversal. The new series is currently called 1313, after the address of the Munsters’ home on 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Beer is set to be the showrunner of the series if it goes forward.

If the premise of 1313 sounds familiar, it’s because Bryan Fuller and director Bryan Singer attempted to do a dark reboot of The Munsters in 2012 with a show called Mockingbird Lane. The series never got past the pilot stage despite a cast that included Jerry O’Connell, Portia de Rossi, and Eddie Izzard. NBC aired the pilot episode once as a Halloween special.

As originally conceived, the Munsters were comprised of Herman Munster, a Frankenstein’s monster-like creature who was a bumbling husband to a vampire, Lily Munster. Their son, Eddie, was more of a werewolf than a vampire; while Lily’s father, Dracula, was known as Grandpa to the family. The Munsters’ cousin, Marilyn, also lived with the family, and she was the only one who was seemingly normal.

The most recent reboot of The Munsters was Rob Zombie’s 2022 film, which focused on the courtship between Herman and Lily. It was savaged by critics and it skipped theaters in favor of streaming on Netflix. If the new incarnation of The Munsters goes forward, it will likely end up on NBC, USA, Syfy, or Peacock.