By MICHAEL GINGOLD
The sci-fi shocker is now being developed as an ongoing series, with its creator on board.
Blumhouse Television has announced that they are teaming with UCP on an UPGRADE show based on the 2018 feature. The film’s writer/director Leigh Whannell, who scored earlier this year with THE INVISIBLE MAN, returns as co-creator and executive producer along with showrunner Tim Walsh, and will direct as well. Whannell and Walsh are also heading up a writers’ room for the first season, joined by Krystal Ziv Houghton and James Roland, who ran the second season of the USA Network’s televersion of THE PURGE. In the UPGRADE feature, Logan Marshall-Green stars as a man paralyzed by a violent attack that kills his wife, and is implanted with an experimental AI computer chip called STEM that gives him superhuman abilities, which he uses to exact revenge. According to the PR, the UPGRADE series “picks 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.” Jason Blum and Automatik’s Brian Kavanaugh-Jones are executive producers on the show as well.
