Kevin Bacon is returning to one of his most beloved roles – among a certain segment of the movie-renting population, anyway. The horror/action/comedy Tremors didn’t make much noise when it appeared back in January of 1990, opening in fifth place and exiting theaters within a month with a modest take of $16 million. But, as so many quirky genre pictures do, it found an audience via home video and endless cable showings, and six years later, Tremors 2: Aftershocks arrived in video stores. It was the first of four direct-to-video sequels; the last of them, Tremors 5: Bloodlines hit disc and digital in 2015 (and Tremors 6 is reportedly in development). Their main tie to the original film was the presence of co-star Michael Gross – Tremors 1 star Bacon was not involved in any of the follow-ups.
Until now. Deadline reports Syfy (of course) has given a pilot order to a Tremors TV adaptation – the second one, in fact, after the short-lived Tremors: The Series in 2003 – in which Bacon will return to the role of Valentine McKee. He will also executive produce the series, which is a co-production of Universal (which distributed the films) and horror hit-makers Blumhouse. “This is the only character I’ve played that I’ve ever thought about revisiting,” he says (which checks out – there’s not a sequel on his CV). “I just got to thinking, ‘Where would this guy end up after 25 years? Andrew Miller has a fantastic take on it, and we hope to create a show that will be fun and scary for fans of the movie and folks that have yet to discover it. Let’s kick some Graboid ass!” All right, settle down, Bacon. Anyway, it’s just a pilot order, which means Syfy will wait to see how that pilot comes out before committing to a series order. But who’re we kidding, it’s Syfy.
And though it has nothing really to do with the news at hand, I’d like to point out that Deadline’s Nellie “Ethnic Castings” Andreeva calls this project a “reboot,” both in the headline and the lede, and I’m sorry because I know we’ve been down this road before, but reboot is not a word that just means something that was done in some way before. This is a TV adaptation of a film series; “reboot” indicates (as with the origin of the term, in the world of computing) a hard reset with new actors, new situations, and often new characters. So when the original actor is “reprising his role,” and you’re using phrases like “the killer Graboid worms that nearly destroyed Perfection, NV, 25 years ago are back” and “Valentine McKee (Bacon), who beat them once,” then that’s not a reboot. That’s an adaptation, or a continuation, or even (as is used later in this dumb article), a spin-off. BUT DAMMIT WORDS HAVE MEANING, and God I’ve picked the dumbest possible hill to die on.