The world of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and Lives of The Mayfair Witches is already expanding at AMC before the first shows have premiered. It was revealed in 2020 that AMC had acquired the rights to 18 of Rice’s novels, and the network announced that they would be developing a brand new series based on Interview With The Vampire and Mayfair Witches. While those series are both coming later this year, AMC Exec Dan McDermott has revealed that there are many more “unofficial” projects to come in the Anne Rice universe.
Anne Rice was best known for her Vampire Chronicle novels, the first being Interview With The Vampire, which was previously made into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in the early 1990s. While there have been other movies made of other books by the author, they have fared poorly at the box office. When it was announced that AMC would be building its own world around her novels, Rice shared her excitement with fans about the future for her characters. Unfortunately, the author passed away in December 2021, so was not able to see her world come to life on the small screen. Speaking to Variety about what AMC is creating, McDermott said:
"We have other projects that are in development. They're sort of unofficial right. now, but we really plan to have five or six series in that universe over the next five or six years. And there will be an opportunity to pull characters from different shows and do what we refer to as our 'all-star' original series, taking supporting characters and maybe a lead character from one or two shows and doing original series that will be based in the Anne Rice universe. The best model would be an Avengers-style series, where you take characters from different shows and bring them together and you tell an original story using all of them and their backstory and the mythology. The objective is to honor everything about the source material and the characters' backstories and mythologies as well. But I think that's a really exciting proposition."
AMC Released First Look at Interview With The Vampire Last Month
AMC shared images from the upcoming series as well as footage from the show last month, revealing one of the first looks at Sam Reid as Lestat de Lioncourt and Jacob Anderson as Louis de Pointe du Lac, as their nocturnal characters enjoy a night on the town gambling and visiting an outdoor club. The images follow the very brief tease shown at this year’s Superbowl as part of AMC’s upcoming line-up of shows. Although they still do not give away too much about the series, it is a compelling reminder that the series is set to air later this year.
Despite some very lackluster attempts to bring Rice’s work to screens, many of which the author herself disowned, AMC’s latest attempt has a lot of promise and, like many modern TV shows, appears to be using its long-form storytelling to weave together multiple novels into one combined narrative. For fans of the Vampire Chronicles, this could finally be the adaptation of Rice’s universe they have been waiting an eternity to see.