‘Sherlock’ Creators To Adapt ‘Dracula’ For Television

Sherlock creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss will reunite to produce a new take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Work on the project has not begun as of yet as Moffat and Gatiss are both still tied up with individual commitments (the final season of Moffat’s tenure on Doctor Who is about to conclude, but he won’t officially bow out until this year’s Christmas special), but negotiations are already underway with the BBC.

Moffat and Gatiss’ Sherlock, which aired its fourth season early in 2017 following a long hiatus, has been hugely successful for the BBC. The series has been one of the biggest titles for BBC’s international distribution wing, BBC Worldwide, in years.

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The new Dracula will use the same format as Sherlock, releasing as a miniseries-length run of feature-length episodes.

Gatiss wrote for the current season of Doctor Who, but Dracula will be the duo’s first new creation since Sherlock.

This is not the first time that Moffat has undertaken an update of classic horror story. In 2007, Moffat wrote the series Jekyll, which served as a kind of sequel to the classic novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

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There is still no confirmation of whether Dracula will transition the vampire lord’s story into the modern day, as Sherlock and Jekyll did with their source material.

For the time being, there are no plans in place for the fifth season of Sherlock, however, Moffat and Gatiss have not ruled out the possibility of eventually returning to the show.

The biggest obstacle to getting more Sherlock may partly be its own success. Sherlock propelled star Benedict Cumberbatch to international fame and he’s since begun appearing regularly in movies including Star Trek Into Darkness, The Imitation Game, and Marvel’s Doctor Strange.

Similarly, Martin Freeman has starred in all three of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit movies and has his own Marvel Studios role as Everett Ross in Captain America: Civil War and the upcoming Black Panther. Coordinating the schedules of such in-demand movie stars for a television series can be complicated.

Source: Variety