Fox is looking for its own set of zombies.
Fresh off the record-breaking ratings for Sunday’s Season 2 premiere of AMC’s The Walking Dead, the network and Sony Pictures Television are developing a potential half-hour comedy based on the Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson and Emma Stone starrer Zombieland.
The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed that Fox and SPT are in development on a half-hour comedy version of the 2009 feature from producer Gavin Polone, as first reported by Vulture.
The project would be written by feature scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick and produced through feature distributor Columbia’s sibling unit, Sony Pictures Television with an eye on putting the project into development for the 2012-13 broadcast season. The feature film grossed $75.6 million, with a sequel in the works for next year. A potential TV series, Polone told the site, would replace a big-screen follow-up.
The news comes as Walking Dead, the Andrew Lincoln starrer based on the long-running zombie comic series by Robert Kirkman, shattered demo ratings for two key metrics: the advertiser-coveted adults 18-49 and adults 25-54, attracting 7.3 million viewers.
MTV, meanwhile, has shown faith in its zombie series Death Valley, shifting the freshman comedy from showrunner Eric Weinberg (Scrubs) to Mondays at 11 p.m. and out of the way of ESPN’s Monday Night Football as it awaits word on a second season.
Email: Lesley.Goldberg@thr.com; Twitter: @Snoodit
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