Before there was The Matrix, there was Dark City, Alex Proyas’ sci-fi noir about a mysterious world where it’s always night where an amnesiac goes on the run from the police. When I revisited Dark City last year, I wrote “If Dark City had been a hit at all, it would have been a very interesting setting for a television show or even a comic book series.”

It would seem that Alex Proyas agrees with me. In a recent film festival Q&A (via Bloody Disgusting), he said that he’s in the “very early stages” of working on a Dark City television series. He also added:

I’m having to reanalyze in order to construct a new story. I’m having to go back and kind of jog my memory as to what we actually did and what I think worked and what I think didn’t work and reevaluate my own film, so that’s been a very interesting experience as well which I’ve not done before.

He also revealed that while the director’s cut of Dark City that was first released in 2008 does restore much of his original plan for the film before the distributor forced him to recut it, it’s not his full original vision for the material. “The whole point of a director’s cut,” Proyas said “is the illusion that we resalvage what we’ve done originally. But you can never do that. Often it’s just impossible. In those days we shot on neg and the negs being cut. And it’s been cut in a certain way and it’s very, very hard to go right back to what you originally designed. So you do like a hodgepodge version of it.”

As I wrote a year ago, Dark City is a concept tailor made for a series. The film focuses mostly on the story of its main character, played by Rufus Sewell, so it barely gets to explore the full details of this bizarre sci-fi world that it establishes. A series would allow for a lot more of the backstory and the mythology of the place. It sounds like a no-brainer to me. Meanwhile, the original Dark City is available for rent on a variety of digital platforms.

Gallery — Little Details About Dark City We Love:

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