Eli Craig's 2010 horror comedy Tucker & Dale vs. Evil wasn't a huge hit at the box office, but it went on to have a long life as a modern cult classic. A bunch of college students head into the woods for a weekend getaway, run into a pair of friendly hillbillies played by Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine, assume they're mass murdering psychopaths, and panic so powerfully they end up killing themselves by accident. It was a really fun inversion of a formula that's been popular at least since 1981's Evil Dead, and Craig has tried many times over the years to get a sequel or spinoff made. "I always wanted to do a sequel, but Hollywood is a slayer of great ideas," he recently told SlashFilm.
One follow-up did come close to happening, but "when we do set it up, and we get all the pieces together, it gets killed somehow," Craig explained. "We almost did a TV show with it that was on TNT/TBS, and you’ll be happy to know that David Zaslav, the slayer of all cinema, came in and put the final nail in the coffin for Tucker And Dale as we were about to go to series, and just cancelled all production.”
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav is maybe the closest thing Hollywood has to a supervillain. He became infamous for instituting brutal cost-cutting measures at his studio, including burying already-filmed movies in favor of tax write-offs, all while pulling down hundreds of millions of dollars per year for himself. And I suspect these cost-cutting measures have something to do with the weird decisions with HBO shows lately. We just learned that HBO is delaying a new Game of Thrones prequel even though it's already been shot, and I can't help but wonder if Zaslav is somehow involved.
Basically, the guy is an easy punching bag, so I'm receptive to Craig's complaints about him. Craig doesn't reveal exactly when Zaslav pulled the plug on the Tucker & Dale show, but The A.V. Club figures it was around the time Zaslav took over the newly merged Warner Bros. Discovery in the early 2020s, when he was slashing things left and right.
"[It] was more like Tucker and Dale, but detectives," Craig explained of the Tucker & Dale show that never was. "Detective Tucker and Dale, like, stupidly trying to figure out what’s happening in a world where they’re always getting it wrong and people are dying around them.”
Craig has a new movie now in theaters, a new comedy horror film called Clown in a Cornfield, which according to critics subverts expectations in some of the same winning ways that Tucker & Dale did. And Craig hasn't totally given up on doing more with his original hit, either: "[S]tay alive, fans! Because there's always a possibility."
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