Peacock Passed on ‘Hostel,’ But Eli Roth Still Wants to Continue the Franchise

Eli Roth’s Hostel series isn’t moving forward at Peacock, but he still wants to do something with the scripts he wrote with Chris Briggs.

My good friend Edward Douglas asked Roth about the project in an earlier interview for his Substack, where the filmmaker revealed that the streamer had passed. These comments aren’t new, but they’re worth revisiting for anyone still waiting on the series.

“Peacock said no, they’re not going to do it,” Roth explained.

The project was first announced in 2024 with Paul Giamatti attached to star, before landing in development at Peacock in July 2025. Details were scarce, but it was described as a modern reinvention of the franchise, with Roth returning to write, direct, and executive produce.

Looking at how well Crystal Lake is doing for Peacock right now, that decision is pretty shocking. NBCUniversal recently reported that the Friday the 13th prequel became the streamer’s fourth-biggest scripted original debut. Obviously, Peacock passed on Hostel before those numbers came in, but there’s clearly an audience for horror on the service.

And Roth hasn’t given up.

“But Chris Briggs and I wrote the scripts and we love them and I definitely want to turn them into something,” he told Douglas. “So it might not be a TV series, but I still want to continue Hostel.”

We haven’t had a new Hostel since 2011’s Hostel: Part III, which was made without Roth and released directly to home video. After that long, hearing that he has scripts he loves and still wants to return is encouraging, even if the format remains up in the air.

Roth spent this summer bringing Ice Cream Man to theaters through The Horror Section, a project he discussed in our own interview. Whether eventually follows him back to the big screen remains to be seen.