Christian Slater Is an Epic Bloodthirsty Ogre in New ‘Spiderwick Chronicles’
The past few years have brought harrowing stories of streaming platforms shelving completed projects as tax write-offs. This time, at least, there’s a happy ending for the YA series The Spiderwick Chronicles, which was originally made for Disney+, only to be scrapped as a cost-cutting strategy and sold to Roku instead.
Based on Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black’s bestselling fantasy novels about a family who move into their old ancestral home and discover a hidden world of magical creatures, Spiderwick certainly would’ve made sense as a companion to Disney’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians. (Both are based on mid-aughts book series that gained massive popularity in the post-Harry Potter publishing landscape.) On Roku, however, it gets to be an uneven but mostly charming flagship series for the free, ad-supported streamer, which debuts all eight episodes on April 19.
Spiderwick enthusiasts should know that creator Aron Eli Coleite has taken some fairly drastic liberties with the source material—including aging up its twin protagonists from 9-year-olds to teenagers and giving its mystical baddies far more human motivations. In place of the Amblin-inspired whimsy of the 2008 big-screen adaptation starring Freddie Highmore, Coleite’s series tries to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer for tweens. In practice, however, that’s a high-water mark the show can only occasionally reach.