High-Profile Peacock Show Officially Scrapped

A high-profile Peacock show is no longer happening.

After it was announced in 2025 that the Upgrade sequel series was canceled, producer Tim Walsh further confirmed the news.

Deadline announced in 2020 that Leigh Whannell’s 2018 sci-fi thriller Upgrade would be getting a TV follow-up. The film follows a technophobe who is implanted with a chip that allows him to control his body after a mugging left him paralyzed. The series would have picked up a few years after the events of the film and “broadens the universe with an evolved version of STEM and a new host – imagining a world in which the government repurposes STEM to help curb criminal activity.”

Blumhouse Television and UCP were set to collaborate on the project, but in early 2025, Whannell, who was going to direct, alluded to the show’s cancellation during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. He said, “As far as making a sequel to Upgrade, it’s another one where he thinks they’re good and it doesn’t need another. “I would love to let that film keep bubbling away as this cult movie, and if people keep thinking that it was somehow prophetic, then that would be great.”

Now, in a recent interview with Bloody Disgusting, Tim Walsh is giving a bit more details about the cancellation. “Leigh and I sold that to Peacock back in 2019,” he recalled. “I think I started my writer’s room for Upgrade on the day the world shut down from the pandemic. We had the writer’s room. We wrote the scripts. But, as often happens in this business, somebody up top at Peacock got fired, and a new person came in, thought they knew everything, and dropped that project. It never got picked up later because it was a tumultuous time in the world.”

Considering Whannell has no interest in doing an Upgrade sequel, it can be assumed that he and Walsh won’t be trying to get the series off the ground again. Whether the series would have actually moved forward had it not been for the pandemic is unknown, but COVID certainly messed with a lot of things, so it’s not surprising to know that the pandemic was the nail in the coffin for the Upgrade sequel series.