Blumhouse Television and UCP are adapting Leigh Whannell’s 2018 sci-fi thriller Upgrade into a television series for Whannell to potentially direct, we had learned last year.
The series, which Whannell co-created and will executive produce along with showrunner Tim Walsh (Treadstone, Chicago P.D., Shooter), picks up a few years after the events of the film and broadens the universe with an evolved version of STEM and a new host – imagining a world in which the government repurposes STEM to help curb criminal activity.
Updating on the project this week, producer Jason Blum tells Collider that the team is still working on the scripts for the series, making sure they get them just right.
“Upgrade should have been a wide release. I was pissed about that,” Blum notes. “We’re working on a TV show. So working on the scripts. This first round, didn’t come out. I didn’t get the response I wanted to get. I don’t want to be in development. I want an order. We’re working on the scripts again, so that we can get an order.”
In other words, Blum is looking for a full-on green light series order for the Upgrade project, which can only come when they nail down the best possible scripts. Stay tuned for more.
The film, which Whannell wrote and directed, starred Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel and Harrison Gilbertson. After his wife is killed during a brutal mugging that also leaves him paralyzed, Grey Trace (Marshall-Green) is approached by a billionaire inventor with an experimental cure in the form of a computer chip implant called STEM.
The implant provides its host with heightened physical abilities, allowing Grey to exact revenge on those responsible for his wife’s death.