The Vampire Chronicles is going to have to find itself a new crypt. Anne Rice was originally working to adapt her best-selling books into a series at Hulu, but that’s no longer happening. Now, Rice and her team are shopping the property around for a new home. At one point, Bryan Fuller was set to work on the show, but eventually parted ways.

Variety has the scoop on The Vampire Chronicles TV series, which is now in search of a new home. And it seems Rice and her team have upped the ante and increased the package to include a “complete buyout of the TV/film rights”:

According to one insider, the new package being shopped includes both “The Vampire Chronicles” and also Rice’s “Mayfair Witches,” which is currently set up at Warner Bros. The asking price is said to be around $30 to $40 million, in addition to a $2.5 million buyout of Warner Bros.’ rights. In exchange for the huge upfront fee however, the new owner will hold the rights in perpetuity, and not just as an option.

Rice has been trying to get a Vampire Chronicles series off the ground for a few years now, at one point attracting Bryan Fuller to the project. Fuller would’ve been a perfect fit for the material, as his Hannibal series owed a considerable debt to Rice’s vampire tales. Sadly, things didn’t work out, and Fuller walked away. The show languished in the hands of producers at Paramount Television and Anonymous Content, who planned to bring it to Hulu, but the rights have since expired.

The Vampire Chronicles began in 1976 with Interview with the Vampire. Rice’s gothic book is often attributed with popularizing vampires as sexy, romantic figures, as opposed to straight-up horror villains. Rice would follow Interview up with several other books: The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Queen of the Damned (1988), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), The Vampire Armand (1998), Merrick (2000), Blood and Gold (2001) Blackwood Farm (2002), Blood Canticle (2003), Prince Lestat (2014) and Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (2016). While Interview remains a strong book, its subsequent sequels decreased in quality. In my humble opinion, everything after The Tale of the Body Thief is almost unreadable.

In 1994, Interview with the Vampire was turned into a hit movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Despite the box office success, it would take years before another Vampire Chronicles film arrived – 2002’s terrible Queen of the Damned. In the right hands, Rice’s books would work well adapted into a TV series, so here’s hoping things eventually work out.

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