The Umbrella Academy was originally planned to be a movie, but it ended up being a successful TV series. Created by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, The Umbrella Academy is a comic book series of three volumes (so far), published between 2007 and 2019, with a fourth series in development and expected to be released sometime this year. The comics were recently adapted into a TV series and distributed by Netflix, and was one of the biggest surprises of the streaming platform in 2019.
The Umbrella Academy follows the dysfunctional family of adopted siblings, the Hargreeves. All seven of them were born on the same day and under very mysterious circumstances, and were adopted by the equally mysterious billionaire Sir. Reginald Hargreeves. Each kid developed a unique set of superpowers, so Reginald trained them and formed the superhero team “the Umbrella Academy”. Reginald wasn’t the best father figure, and the siblings eventually went on their own ways, reuniting years later for Reginald’s funeral – and to stop the fast approaching apocalypse.
The series was a big hit, and became the third most popular TV series on Netflix in 2019, but the TV show format and the world of streaming weren’t the initial plan for an adaptation of The Umbrella Academy, and it was originally going to be a movie.
How The Umbrella Academy Ended Up As A TV Series
An Umbrella Academy movie was in development in the early 2010s, with Universal Studios developing the project and Rawson Marshall Thurber penning the script. However, the studio didn’t really know what to do with it and its option expired. In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2019, Gerard Way shared that the process was “emotionally hard”, “really time-consuming and draining”, and the meetings weren’t really going anywhere. Way was later approached by Dark Horse and asked what he thought about the Umbrella Academy as a TV show, and was paired up with Jeremy Slater to shop it to several networks.
In a different interview with NME, Way shared that “quite a few people wanted to make” the Umbrella Academy TV series, but Netflix ended up being the winner. Slater was originally going to be the showrunner, but his commitment with Fox’s The Exorcist didn’t allow him to take the project, and Steve Blackman was brought in. The series was officially greenlit in 2017 and began filming in early 2018. Way also said he envisioned the Umbrella Academy movie as the “first postmodern superhero movie” and as a chance to make “the first cool, arthouse comic book movie”, but in the end, it wasn’t the right time for it. The Umbrella Academy is better off as a TV series, as this format gave it a future, with season 2 now in post-production. Hopefully, it won’t be long until the new season arrives.