Netflix sets R.L. Stine's 'Fear Street' horror trilogy for 2021 — and the films have already wrapped

There’s been plenty of intrepid murmuring over the past couple of years about when we’d get to see the forthcoming trio of Fear Street films based on R.L. Stine’s spook-tacular books. Today, Netflix reportedly gave an answer: The movie trilogy will be creeping onto the small screen as an event series next summer.

Per Deadline, the red-letter streaming giant is planning to debut the first Fear Street film from director Leigh Janiak early next summer as part of a three-month “Summer of Fear” small-screen event that’ll see the full trilogy arrive well ahead of the Halloween spooky season. Janiak (Honeymoon, Scream: The TV Series) reportedly has wrapped production on all three movies, after the trilogy moved from Disney (as a legacy Fox project) earlier this year in an overall Netflix deal with Fear Street production company Chernin Entertainment.

Originally planned to hit theaters two months ago in June, the first film ended up facing the same big-screen fate as other movies sidelined by the coronavirus pandemic. But that gave filmmakers a new window of opportunity: “Chernin’s Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping were given the latitude to set up the films elsewhere, and they decided to experiment with a model-busting release with Netflix,” the report states.

Set in Stine’s Fear Street lore-verse, a slightly more sinister (and bloody) place than the Goosebumps books that preceded them, Fear Street unfolds in the early 1990s, as the kids of a small Ohio town discover (and, of course, stubbornly investigate) a series of deaths and other creepy phenomena that add up to more than the sum of their scary parts. Meddling with evil forces has a way of coming back to haunt them, though, setting up three films’ worth of horror that span time periods and character swaps that will explore the mystery’s origins — dating all the way to the 17th century.

We’ve still got nearly a year to go before it’s time to dim the lights and get the late-night popcorn ready, so there’s sure to be more info about each movie (including titles and full casting news) in the months to come. So far, we know the films have roped in a long list of actors including Gillian Jacobs, Sadie Sink, Kiana Madeira, Olivia Welch, Benjamin Flores Jr., Ashley Zukerman, Fred Hechinger, Julia Rehwald, and Jeremy Ford.