AMC wants to have “five or six” Anne Rice shows on within a few years

AMC is currently working on a TV show based on Interview With The Vampire, Anne Rice’s classic 1976 book about a family of melancholy vampires drinking blood through the centuries.

But that’s not all it’s working on. AMC is also making a series based on Rice’s Mayfair Witches novels, and apparently that’s just the beginning, as AMC executive Dan McDermott revealed to Variety. “We have other projects that are in development,” he said. “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.”

That’s a lot of Anne Rice stuff. She certainly wrote enough books over the course of her life to support multiple TV series, but it’s a little alarming to see AMC planning on making a giant cinematic universe before they’ve even put out one project. Even Marvel slowly built up to the juggernaut that is the MCU over a period of years; you need a foundation before you can build, and AMC doesn’t even know if Interview With The Vampire will be a hit yet.

AMC wants to make an “Avengers-style series” out of Anne Rice’s books

And it gets worse. McDermott is already planning elaborate crossovers for his cinematic universe that doesn’t have a single star in it yet. “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,” he said.

"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."

So you want to honor the source material but you also want to tell an original story where a bunch of characters from stories that don’t intersect team up to form a blood-sucking supergroup? This sounds like a disaster in the making…

Interview With The Vampire is set to premiere this fall. We don’t have a release date for the Mayfair Witches show, to say nothing of Anne Rice’s The Avengers.

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