Horror and Sci-Fi Brief · Saturday 17 October 2026
Russell T Davies has lifted the lid on the Doctor Who series we never got, and the specials that launched Ncuti Gatwa finally have a soundtrack release. This morning’s brief also brings Red Rising to Paramount, Thunderbirds back to UK cinemas, a bigger season of It: Welcome to Derry, three new horror developments and the latest from DC.
The News That Matters
Ncuti Gatwa’s lost third Doctor Who series: the Great Fire, Rogue in Blackpool and a Dalek epic
- New development: Russell T Davies details the unmade series in his memoir, The Queerest of Folk: A Life in Television
- Completed scripts: Three, with concepts for two more episodes and rough plans for another three
- Status: Never made, after Disney’s partnership with the BBC came to an end
- UK availability: The memoir is out now; the series itself will not be made
Russell T Davies has finally shown us what Ncuti Gatwa’s third series would have looked like. In his memoir, The Queerest of Folk: A Life in Television, he writes that three scripts were fully written before the plug was pulled, and that “it breaks my heart they won’t be seen”. According to Blogtor Who’s reading of the book, there were also concepts for two more episodes and rough plans for three others.
The finished scripts sound like a terrific spread. Laurence Clark and Jack Thorne, both new to Doctor Who, wrote a Great Fire of London story that Davies says deserved the budget to do it properly, “with the flames and panic and everything”. Lydia Adetunji wrote a horror set aboard a NASA-type space station and built around trypophobia, while Sharma Angel-Walfall wrote an episode set on a council estate in the middle of Manchester, which Davies likens to Doctor Who meeting the film Rocks.
Davies also wanted Juno Dawson back after The Interstellar Song Contest, and was talking to Kate Herron and Briony Redman about returning Jonathan Groff’s Rogue in an Eighties story, “maybe set in Blackpool with video arcades at its centre”. The run would have ended with a four-part Dalek epic. It is the latest lost chapter from a memoir that has already given us the spin-off sequels that never reached the screen, and you can catch up on the Doctor Who chapters that matter in our earlier round-up.
Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary specials soundtrack arrives on Doctor Who Day
- Release: Three digital albums, one for each 2023 special, on Monday 23 November 2026
- CD: Triple-disc set on Friday 27 November 2026
- Label and composer: Silva Screen Records; music by Murray Gold
- UK availability: Streaming and download from 23 November; three-disc set from 27 November
Murray Gold’s scores for The Star Beast, Wild Blue Yonder and The Giggle are finally getting a release. Silva Screen Records will put them out as three digital albums, one for each special, on 23 November, the anniversary of the show’s first broadcast and the date fans now celebrate as Doctor Who Day. A triple-disc set follows on 27 November.
These were the specials that brought David Tennant and Catherine Tate back as the Fourteenth Doctor and Donna, and introduced Ncuti Gatwa at the end of The Giggle. Gold’s return came with a brand-new arrangement of the theme and familiar motifs such as “I Am the Doctor”, so this fills a gap fans have been pointing at for nearly three years.
Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence will bring Red Rising to the screen
- Studio: Paramount Pictures, which has acquired the film rights
- Director: Francis Lawrence
- Screenplay: Justin Rhodes, adapting the first novel
- Executive producer: Author Pierce Brown
- UK availability: UK date not yet confirmed
Paramount has picked up the film rights to Pierce Brown’s bestselling Red Rising books, with Francis Lawrence attached to direct an adaptation of the first novel. Lawrence has directed four Hunger Games films, and his fifth, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, reaches UK cinemas on 20 November. Justin Rhodes, who worked on Terminator: Dark Fate and developed Netflix’s BioShock adaptation with Lawrence, is writing the script. Lawrence and Cameron MacConomy produce for their company about:blank with Francesco Goedhuis, and Brown is an executive producer.
The story follows Darrow, a Red miner on Mars who discovers that his people have been enslaved by the ruling Gold caste, and who is remade to infiltrate Gold society and join a rebellion against its colour-coded hierarchy. Lawrence knows how to make a dystopia feel like a world worth fighting over. The bigger challenge will be fitting Brown’s brutal, Roman-flavoured saga into a single film.
A restored Thunderbirds double bill is heading back to UK cinemas
- Episodes: Atlantic Inferno and Attack of the Alligators!
- Restoration: 4K from the original film elements, with a Dolby 5.1 surround mix
- Running time: About 1 hour 40 minutes
- UK availability: One-off screenings in UK cinemas from Saturday 28 November 2026; both episodes are already out on a 4K collector’s edition Steelbook
Thunderbirds are go, again. Two of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Supermarionation classics, Atlantic Inferno and Attack of the Alligators!, are returning to the big screen as a one-off double bill, fully restored in 4K from the original film elements with a Dolby 5.1 mix.
In Atlantic Inferno, Jeff Tracy takes a rare holiday and leaves Scott in charge of International Rescue, just as disaster threatens the Seascape drilling rig. Attack of the Alligators! is pure monster-movie fun, as an experimental growth drug leaks into the water with predictably enormous results. The screenings follow last year’s pairing of Trapped in the Sky and Terror in New York City.
It: Welcome to Derry season two promises a Pennywise you’ve never seen
- Status: Renewed; scripts about halfway written, with a production schedule in place
- Setting: Derry in 1935, during the Great Depression
- Showrunner: Brad Caleb Kane, now running the series alone
- UK availability: Season one is on Sky and NOW; season two UK date not yet confirmed
Brad Caleb Kane, now sole showrunner of HBO’s It prequel, has told Deadline that season two will be bigger than the first and will show Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise “the way you’ve never seen that character before”. The scripts are about halfway written, there is a production schedule, and Andy Muschietti is casting.
The new season goes back to 1935 and the massacre of the Bradley Gang, the bank robbers who stop in Derry to buy ammunition and run into something far worse, a piece of town history taken from Stephen King’s novel. Kane calls it “a Warner Bros. gangster movie”, with bank robbers, Hoovervilles, street urchins riding the rails and religious fundamentalism. Each season steps back another 27 years, in time with Pennywise’s cycle.
Diablo Cody says Jennifer’s Body 2 digs into why Jennifer is sympathetic
- Status: In development at 20th Century Studios
- Writer: Diablo Cody
- Cast: Not confirmed; Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried have both said they would like to return
- UK availability: UK date not yet confirmed
Diablo Cody says the sequel to her 2009 horror comedy is happening “imminently”, and that it let her “explore even more about why Jennifer is sympathetic and what she’s been through”. Speaking on the Petticoat Revolution podcast, she described Megan Fox’s Jennifer as “very isolated, she’s very lonely, she’s very insecure”, both before and after her transformation.
It is a smart way back in. The original has been reclaimed as a cult favourite precisely because there was more going on beneath the one-liners, and Cody points to the moments when Jennifer is “like a shell of herself” rather than the “I am a god” swagger everyone remembers. Original director Karyn Kusama has said she is excited to see what comes of it.
Larry Fessenden’s Trauma Or, Monsters All unleashes its monsters in a new trailer
- New development: Official trailer released by Dark Sky Films
- Writer-director: Larry Fessenden
- US release: Selected cinemas from Wednesday 4 November 2026, with a digital release to follow
- UK availability: UK date not yet confirmed
Dark Sky Films has released the trailer for indie horror veteran Larry Fessenden’s monster epic. Laëtitia Hollard (The Pitt) plays Cassandra, a visiting writer researching a book on George Washington Carver in the quiet upstate town of Talbot Falls. When she publishes an article exposing the town’s unsettling past, a werewolf, a vampire and a Frankenstein creation emerge from the shadows.
Addison Timlin, Alex Hurt, Barbara Crampton, James Le Gros and Fessenden himself also star. He has spent a career reimagining classic monsters in films such as Habit, Wendigo and Depraved, and says this one brings those stories together “into one film about memory, identity, and the wounds we carry”.
Stephanie Beatriz and Daniel Ings join Kevin Bacon’s demon horror Summoner
- New development: Cast additions announced as filming begins
- Studio: Amazon MGM Studios
- Writer-director: Jeremy Slater, creator of TV’s The Exorcist
- Producers: Andy and Barbara Muschietti, with Russell Ackerman
- UK availability: UK date not yet confirmed; a cinema release is planned
Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Stephanie Beatriz and The Gentlemen’s Daniel Ings have joined Kevin Bacon in Summoner, which has now started production at Amazon MGM Studios. Their roles are under wraps, and they join the previously announced Giorgia Whigham.
Bacon plays Jefferson Haddock, who is called to an isolated witness protection property to deal with a terrifying demon, unleashing a force that threatens to end him and everything around him. Bacon has never been shy of genre work, from Tremors to They/Them, and a demon hiding in witness protection is a hook that sells itself.
Tara Emad joins The Mummy: Book of the Dead
- New development: Tara Emad cast in a role described as a lead, a day after Universal revealed the title
- Stars: Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz as Rick and Evie O’Connell
- Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett of Radio Silence
- US release: 15 October 2027
- UK availability: UK date not yet confirmed
Universal confirmed on Thursday that the film reuniting Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz as Rick and Evie O’Connell is called The Mummy: Book of the Dead. A day later, Dread Central reported that Egyptian actress Tara Emad has joined the now-filming sequel, in a role its sources describe as a lead.
Emad’s credits include Diamond Dust, the Arabic adaptation of Suits and The Blue Elephant 2. She joins returning stars John Hannah, Oded Fehr and Kevin J. O’Connor, along with Michael Johnston and Numan Acar. Radio Silence direct from a script by David Coggeshall, and their knack for mixing scares with fun feels well suited to a series that always worked best as a thrill ride.
DC’s Clayface shows its body horror in a new clip
- New development: Warner Bros. has released a new clip, The Plane
- Director: James Watkins, from a script by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini
- Star: Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen
- UK availability: In UK cinemas from Friday 23 October 2026
- US release: In cinemas from 23 October 2026
With a week to go, Warner Bros. has shared a new clip from Clayface. Titled The Plane, it traps Tom Rhys Harries’s Matt Hagen on a flight as the side effects of his experimental treatment take hold, and it is not for the squeamish. Hagen is a Gotham-born film star left disfigured by a crime boss, and the cure he reaches for has other ideas.
James Watkins (Speak No Evil) directs from a script by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, with Naomi Ackie, David Dencik, Max Minghella and Eddie Marsan also starring. The first audience reactions leaned hard into the horror, and this clip backs them up.
Update: Matt Reeves says he is not leaving The Batman Part II
- New development: Steven Soderbergh is helping to complete the final weeks of principal photography
- Director: Matt Reeves remains director and will lead post-production
- US release: 18 February 2028
- UK availability: UK date not yet confirmed
After DC Studios confirmed that Steven Soderbergh would step in to help finish the final weeks of filming, Matt Reeves posted: “Just to be clear, I am not leaving The Batman Part II.” He said he was “profoundly grateful to Steven for coming to my aid during this challenging time”. Production was paused earlier this month while Reeves attended to a family matter.
DC Studios co-chief James Gunn backed him on Threads, writing that Reeves “is still the director of The Batman 2 and always will be”. The studio says the pair will work closely with the cast and crew to fulfil Reeves’s vision, and Soderbergh says the aim is footage that will “integrate seamlessly” so Reeves can properly finish his film. Gunn has also knocked down online rumours that Milly Alcock had been dropped as Supergirl.
Movieversalfilm Takeaway
Today belongs to the stories that got away and the ones that refuse to. Doctor Who fans finally get a proper look at the Gatwa series that never was, plus a soundtrack worth saving for Doctor Who Day. Red Rising has landed exactly the right director, Thunderbirds proves a puppet show from the 1960s still belongs on a cinema screen, and the horror slate keeps filling up. On the DC side, the message from Reeves and Gunn could not be clearer: The Batman Part II is still his film.
Which lost Doctor Who story would you most like to have seen: the Great Fire of London, Rogue in Blackpool or the four-part Dalek epic?