‘Upgrade’ Producer Dishes On the TV Sequel That Almost Was

Fans of Leigh Whannell’s sci-fi flick Upgrade may recall there was a point where it seemed like it’d get a sequel. It got announced, then reworked into a TV series, and then…nothing, not a peep until last year when Whannell said the film would stay a one-and-done. What’s the deal there?

Well according to Tim Walsh, the film’s producer who was tapped to write and showrun the series, the show faced several obstacles before getting canned. As he recently told BloodyDisgusting, he and Whannell sold the project to Peacock back in 2019. Then there was a “tumultuous time” in the world, such as starting his writers room “on the day the world shut down” due to the covid-19 pandemic.

Another roadblock was the Upgrade show’s plot: it would’ve been about four criminals recently implanted with the STEM chip in the hopes of reforming them, similar to A Clockwork Orange. Walsh thinks it’d have been risky to air at a time when shows about the police and criminals were “not popular,” likely referencing protests against police brutality in recent years and discussions of television’s role in sanitizing them. But the biggest killer to the project was above his pay grade—as he tells it, the writers were ready and scripts assembled when a Peacock higher-up was fired. Their eventual replacement then “came in, thought they knew everything, and dropped the project.”

That’s where Walsh’s involvement with the show ended, and he was candid in saying it “still hurts” it didn’t get made, though he’s sure there were attempts to revive it without him. Despite how things shook out, he still wants to team with Whannell again, so maybe someday he’ll get a chance to revive the Upgrade show or craft elements from it onto something else.

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