Paramount Switching ‘Hansel & Gretel’ From Film To TV Series?

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount is scratching a plan for a sequel to Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, the 2013 sleeper-hit action film that starred Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton. I’m hearing that plans to make a sequel have been halted — they’d set a director in Bruno Aveillan and everything–and that instead they are formulating a new plan that likely will make it a cable series through Paramount TV. Gary Sanchez will produce it and MGM is also a partner in the TV effort.

Hansel & Gretel only grossed $55 million domestic on a $50 million budget, but the movie absolutely killed it overseas when it was released in early 2013, racking up $170 million in offshore grosses. This is early, and they are still figuring it out, but it is a hot topic because the filmmakers all were taken by surprise. This becomes the second Paramount feature property to jump from films to television, after Jack Ryan was moved to a TV property that’s being done by Carlton Cuse and Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes and which Paramount TV sold to Amazon.

All this is generating chatter that these properties are more valuable to the overall company as regular episodic series than as feature films. Not all of these movie transfers are smash successes; Minority Report on Fox had its first-season order cut down, for instance.

It is unclear whether Renner, Arterton and the rest of the feature gang on Hansel & Gretel will be involved in the TV project, but it sounds like they’ll start from scratch. Stay tuned.