Chucky has new representation. Not the doll himself, obviously, though one imagines he’d be a nightmare in contract negotiations, but his creator. Don Mancini, the man who has written every film in the Child’s Play saga bar the 2019 remake, has signed with Independent Artist Group, and the announcement, reported by Deadline, says he will focus on developing the next iteration of the Chucky franchise while also building a slate of original film and television projects. Bloody Disgusting followed up by confirming that the new film is one Mancini will both write and direct, and that it’s meant for cinemas.
Long-term followers of the Good Guy doll will know this has been brewing for a while. Back in April at Steel City Con in Pittsburgh, Mancini told the crowd he was writing a new Chucky movie, and that his aim was to make the little horror scary again, going back to the tone of Curse of Chucky and the first two Child’s Play films rather than the high camp of the later instalments. It will also stay in continuity with the earlier films and the Chucky TV series, which ran for three seasons from 2021 to 2024 before Syfy and USA Network dropped it, despite Mancini having already pitched season four. The doll, as ever, refused to stay dead.
If it reaches cinemas, it will be the first time Mancini’s Chucky has been on the big screen since Seed of Chucky in 2004. That film, for those who have blotted it out, featured Jennifer Tilly playing herself, a doll-child struggling with gender identity, and John Waters as a paparazzo. It was many things, but scary was not one of them. Curse and Cult then went straight to video, which may have been the creepiest thing to happen to the franchise: Chucky stalking the bargain bins of supermarkets nationwide.
What we don’t have is anything else. There’s no studio named, no title, no cast list and no release date, and the project is still at the script stage. Brad Dourif, who has voiced Chucky in every Mancini instalment and on television, has retired from acting with one exception, and he has made it very plain that “Nobody’s doing Chucky but me”. In July he said he’d heard several different pitches for the next film, all quite different from one another, and that Mancini would likely do something nobody saw coming. Tilly, meanwhile, has said that more Chucky and Tiffany are on the way. Neither has formally been confirmed for this one.
Making Chucky properly frightening again is easier said than done. A doll who has spent the last two decades doing stand-up between murders is a hard thing to un-know, rather like trying to be scared of Freddy Krueger after his rap video. But Mancini has form: Curse of Chucky was a genuine surprise, a creaky old dark house picture that remembered there’s nothing funny about a small plastic face peering at you from the bottom of the stairs. If he can bottle that again, the doll might yet earn his cinema ticket. Just don’t leave him alone with the projectionist.
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