Gerard Way’s and Gabriel Ba’s THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY comes to Netflix

One of the very first comics I ever read was The Umbrella Academy. As a huge My Chemical Romance fan in 2007, anything lead singer Gerard Way did was a magnet for me. I found this comic charming and was surprised to discover that even after I had expanded my comics horizons a few years later, Way’s and artist Gabriel Ba’s series still held up. The story, published by Dark Horse, about a dysfunctional family of former superheroes remains one of the most singular takes on the genre since Doom Patrol and has been in development across film and TV studios for the last decade. Now, Splash Report has the scoop that The Umbrella Academy has returned to development as a Netflix Original Series.

Last year, screenwriter Jeremy Slater indicated that he had written a pilot episode for The Umbrella Academy and was shopping it around with Way. Slater said the following about his hopes for the series:

I definitely wrote the pilot for The Umbrella Academy. I think it’s really exciting. I think it’s really surprising and funny. I took the job because I’m such an immense fan of what Gerard [Way] and Gabriel [Ba] did with that book. It’s one of those things where I would rather be the guy to screw it up than sit back and let someone else come in and do the bad adaptation. So, I was really adamant about taking the job, but the only way I was going to do it was if I could make it weird and make it true to the spirit of the book. There’s a lot of weird shit in The Umbrella Academy, and it would be very easy to sand down some of those weird edges and make it more familiar to American audiences. I’m fighting very hard to not let that happen. We’re shopping around the pilot, at the moment. We’re trying to find the right home for it and trying to find someone as excited as we are.

Netflix had no comment on the scoop but Splash Report speculates that we many see an announcement as soon as San Diego Comic Con in two weeks. We’ll be on the look out for any information that arises.