The second season of Locke & Key is officially in production at Netflix. Friday afternoon, the show’s official Instagram revealed a picture of the Locke family as they posed for the opportunity. As of now, it’s unclear when the streamer plans on releasing the show’s sophomore outing; at the current rate, it’s plausible the show is a release in the second or third quarter of 2021.
The first season dropped this February, immediately before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The initial batch of episodes received a tepid response from critics and fans alike, currently rocking a 66-percent Fresh (and 68-percent Audience Score) on Rotten Tomatoes.
One of the major criticisms of the series — something that’s been in development at various networks for the better part of a decade — was that it strayed away from the source material’s cold, hard roots in horror. According to Locke & Key creator Joe Hill, that was something by design as the streamer hoped to reach as wide of an audience as possible, injecting some fantasy into the world of the show.
“I loved the show. I loved what the show became,” Hill revealed to ComicBook.com earlier this summer. “Carlton Cuse, who’s the showrunner on it, is kind of a professor of television and he made himself a student of the previous two attempts to adapt Locke & Key, which had failed, and tried to crack the puzzle of why those versions did not work. I think that Locke & Key, the comic book, was always like ‘Harry Potter gone bad.’ It was always a little bit like R-rated Harry Potter. Scarier. More horror. It was less ‘Harry Potter,’ more ‘Horror Potter.’
He continued, “And I think that what he realized was there were the elements of this terrific YA fantasy thing there and that the solution to the problem was to lean into that. So the earlier versions of Locke & Key were two parts horror and two parts fantasy. And the Netflix version is one part horror, three parts fantasy, and that seems to be the right chemical mix for TV.”
The first season of Locke & Key is now streaming on Netflix.