Why Is Mike Flanagan Moving From Netflix to Prime Video?

The Big Picture

• Mike Flanagan’s partnership with Netflix began in 2019 with the release of The Haunting of Hill House, which was followed by The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass.
• Flanagan and his producer Trevor Macy recently announced a multiyear series deal with Amazon Studios, making The Fall of the House of Usher his final production with Netflix.
• Flanagan has plans to adapt Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series next, with a pilot script already written and a vision for at least five seasons of the show.

For many horror fans, the release of Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix came as a bittersweet piece of news. On one hand, the show is yet another entry amazing production that the horror master has created for the streamer. Not to mention that it’s a horror production based on the works of the raven himself, Edgar Allan Poe. But, in turn, the arrival of The Fall of the House of Usher also marks the end of a fruitful partnership between Netflix and Flanagan. From now on, lovers of the macabre will have to look someplace else for their annual dose of Flanagan. More specifically, they will have to look to Prime Video. Yes, Mike Flanagan is leaving Netflix behind for a deal with a different streaming platform. That is definitely a relief for those who were under the impression that the director was merely leaving his previous home behind with nothing in sight. Rest assured, Flanagan has a plan, and it’s a plan that involves even more adaptations of horror classics for the screen.

When Did Mike Flanagan’s Partnership With Netflix Begin?

Flanagan and Macy’s deal with Netflix kicked off officially in 2019, shortly after Flanagan developed and produced his debut television series, The Haunting of Hill House, for the streamer. Released in 2018, the show is a critically acclaimed and fan-favorite 10-episode-long horror drama about a family devastated by grief and a house haunted by more than just ghosts.

Based on the 1959 novel of the same name by Shirley Jackson, but with key changes to the story that are entirely Flanagan’s, the miniseries paved the way for Flanagan and Macy’s second TV project, a new chapter on what became known as the “Haunting anthology:” The Haunting of Bly Manor. Once again loosely adapted from a classic horror novel, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Bly Manor is a love story-turned-horror tale about a pair of lovers who find each other in — you guessed it! — a haunted house.

The Haunting of Bly Manor came out in 2020 and was followed in 2021 by Flanagan’s first entirely original series, a lauded exploration of faith and fear called Midnight Mass. One year later, Flanagan would release his second original show, The Midnight Club, but the reception would not be as warm. Planned as ongoing, The Midnight Club failed to impress critics as well as to make numbers for Netflix, which led to its cancellation after a single season. Flanagan took to Tumblr to reveal his plans for a Season 2 and did not keep his dissatisfaction with Netflix a secret.

“When we agreed to do The Midnight Club,” he told Deadline, “the entire company was very different. I think we both feel it’s safe to say that a show like that, which we thought was innovative and harder to classify, requires some pretty robust promotion to get off the ground properly, and Netflix’s strategy for promoting new shows has changed quite a bit.”

Besides the shows, Flanagan also directed two movies, 2016’s Hush and 2017’s Gerald’s Game, for Netflix. Finally, in 2023, he dropped his final project for the streamer, The Fall of the House of Usher. Based on the novel of the same title as well as on multiple other stories and poems by the classic master of horror Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher is a contemporary series about a wealthy and powerful family’s downfall. Currently at number 1 on the streamer’s top 10, the show is also a critical hit, guaranteeing that Flanagan and Macy will be leaving Netflix behind with a bang.

Why Is Mike Flanagan Moving From Netflix to Amazon?

The news of Flanagan’s move to Prime first dropped on December 1, 2022. Alongside producer Trevor Macy, with whom he has collaborated on many of his projects, from 2013’s Oculus to The Fall of the House of Usher, the director announced a multiyear series deal with Amazon Studios. According to this relatively new contract, Flanagan and Macy’s company, Intrepid Pictures, is set to produce an undisclosed number of projects that will be available to stream exclusively on Prime Video. In a conjoined statement to Deadline, Flanagan and Macy said about the new partnership: “Amazon is a studio that we have long admired. Their commitment to engaging in groundbreaking series and content aligns with the ethos of what we have built at Intrepid. We are looking forward to working with the entire Amazon team as we bring our brand of genre productions to the service and audiences around the globe.”

Is this just a basic PR statement with all the words we expect in the order we expect them to be? Or are Flanagan and Macy really dissatisfied with Netflix as a hub for “groundbreaking” projects? There is no way of knowing for sure, but there’s also no denying that the overall quality of Netflix originals has taken a dive in the past few years. While there are still interesting original shows and movies to be found on the platform — The Fall of the House of Usher being one of them — saying that something is a Netflix project in 2023 doesn’t mean the same thing that it did three years ago. And though Prime has had its fair share of disasters, shows like Outer Range, Swarm, and even Good Omens and The Boys show that there might be more room for interesting TV-making on the other side of the streaming fence.

Mike Flanagan Will Take on Stephen King’s the Dark Tower Series Next

And Flanagan already knows what he will be doing once his partnership with Amazon Studios kicks off. Soon after announcing his new home, the director confirmed what some already theorized from the moment the deal came out: there’s an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower in the oven. On December 8, merely a week after Macy and him released their initial statement, Flanagan told Deadline that he is working on a new version of the series of books — and, as of 2023, he’s made some serious progress on the project. “I wrote a pilot,” he said in the interview, “we view it as a series that’s going at least five seasons. And having lived with this project as long as I have, I have an enormous amount of it worked out in my brain. But I have a pilot script I’m thrilled with and a very detailed outline for the first season and a broader outline for the subsequent seasons.”

Now, Flanagan was also careful to say that the rights to The Dark Tower belong to Intrepid Pictures and were carved out of the Amazon deal. This means that, if everything goes wrong, he can still take the project to some other platform. Still, fans are excited about the prospect of seeing Flanagan’s take on King’s beloved book series, which spans eight novels and a novella.

Starting in 1980, with The Gunslinger, the series is an ambitious story that traverses multiple universes, starring a hero called Roland of Gilead in his search for the mysterious Man in Black and an obscure place known as the Dark Tower. The rights to the books have been floating around in Hollywood since 2007 when King finally sold them to J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. The idea was to turn it into a TV show, but things didn’t move forward. In 2010, Ron Howard announced his plans to turn the books into a movie trilogy followed by a TV series, but, again, the production hit a wall.

It was only in 2017 that The Dark Tower finally managed to crawl its way out of development hell. What emerged was a movie starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. Marketed as both an adaptation and a sequel to the original series of novels, the movie completely missed the point of what made the books so popular, leaving fans disappointed and, quite frankly, befuddled. In the end, what was supposed to become Hollywood’s newest big franchise went nowhere. Now, it’s time for Flanagan to try his hand at the material, which will be kind of a first for him, as the director has never worked in straightforward fantasy before. And though The Dark Tower may have its spooky elements, it is a fantasy story through and through.

All episodes of The Fall of the House of Usher are available to stream on Netflix.

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