M. Night Shyamalan's Next TV Series Is The Toy Adaptation You Never Saw Coming

Apparently, we don't have to "ask again later" about a potential project based around the truth-telling children's toy the Magic 8 Ball, because M. Night Shyamalan is directing a forthcoming Magic 8 Ball TV show.

In an Instagram post, Shyamalan, whose major other TV venture, Apple's "Servant," ended in 2023, posted a photo of the titular toy on top of a script for a Magic 8 Ball TV pilot directed by him and written by Brad Falchuk. For the uninitiated, Falchuk is best known as a frequent collaborator of Ryan Murphy who's worked on shows like "Glee," "American Horror Story," "Pose," and "Scream Queens."

"Been working on this for a couple years ... Who's in?" Shyamalan asked in his post with the hashtags "#ItsCertain" and "Magic8Ball." Now, I know what you're thinking, especially if you watched the Emmy-winning comedy "The Studio" this year: Isn't this creatively bankrupt, even by Hollywood's standards? On the one hand, it is, even though a Magic 8 Ball movie was floated back in 2019 under the Blumhouse Productions umbrella (there's been no further word on that, as of this writing) and even though Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" movie pretty famously became an unexpected critical darling despite being based on a toy. On the other hand, the idea of a Magic 8 Ball TV show is deeply and utterly silly, and for that exact reason, I think my fellow Philly guy Shyamalan is the perfect person to helm it.

If you need evidence that a Magic 8 Ball TV series could actually be fun if it's directed by somebody as clever as M. Night Shyamalan, look no further than "Trap," the writer-director's 2024 movie that basically asked, "What if 'Silence of the Lambs' took place at Taylor Swift's Eras Tour?" (That's not conjecture on my part; Shyamalan said that was his concept for the movie, which rocks.) There's no question that "Trap" is Shyamalan's funniest movie to date. Even though the auteur has certainly exhibited a dark sense of humor throughout his body of work, "Trap" is often openly hilarious, particularly because Josh Hartnett is so incredibly good as the movie's central character (and main villain) Cooper Abbott.

Under Shyamalan's careful direction, Hartnett brings Cooper, a firefighter and a dad who also just so happens to be a Philadelphia-area serial killer dubbed "the Butcher," fully to life — and because we learn so early in the movie that Cooper and the Butcher are one and the same, the audience gets to go along for the ride with him as he tries to evade authorities and simultaneously shepherd his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) around a concert held by pop star Lady Raven. (The pop star is, amusingly, played by Shyamalan's daughter Saleka Night.) To call Cooper shifty is a massive understatement, and Shyamalan really has Hartnett lean all the way in to his strangeness, giving the movie a delightfully heightened feeling that's both hysterically funny and incredibly unsettling. Shyamalan is a one-of-a-kind director who concocts movies like "Trap," so forgive me for saying that I'm weirdly excited to see where he's going to take this Magic 8 Ball project.

Again, if you, like me and so many other people, watched and enjoyed "The Studio," which features an entire storyline about a horrible-sounding Kool-Aid movie, this is all sounding and feeling a little weird and even sort of ominous. Is this all Hollywood is anymore? Instead of just rebooting stuff by slapping "young" in front of a character name like "Young Sheldon," are executives just digging through boxes of their old toys and greenlighting movies and TV shows based on whatever they see? To an extent, yeah, they are doing that, particularly after the genuinely insane and pretty wonderful success of 2023's "Barbie." People had their doubts, but after Greta Gerwig produced a heartfelt spectacle centered around Barbie's (Margot Robbie) journey of self-actualization and Ken's (Ryan Gosling) ill-conceived flirtation with the patriarchy, "Barbie" made well over a billion dollars and snagged a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards. Toy movies can work if an interesting director is behind them, apparently. (The A24 "Barney" movie with Daniel Kaluuya on its creative team also comes to mind here – fingers crossed for that one.)

I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, if we're using the fictional Kool-Aid movie as an example, this all feels weird and bad. But I'm going to dust off my optimist hat for just a second, though. On the other hand, these presumably awful concepts are being handed to directors who take big swings and refuse to play it safe; say what you will about M. Night Shyamalan, but that guy has never played it safe, for better ("Unbreakable") and for worse ("The Happening"). Maybe this Magic 8 Ball series will be terrible. Maybe it'll be a fun diversion. We can expect at least one thing, though: another big swing from Shyamalan's delightfully twisted mind.