‘Cruel Intentions’: NBC Confirms Discussions For Possible Pickup Of Sequel

During NBC’s upfront press call today, NBC chairman Bob Greenblatt confirmed that the network is keeping its pilot Cruel Intentions alive. The project, a sequel to the cult movie which has original star Sarah Michelle Gellar reprising her role, was not picked up to series, but not passed on either.

“It goes under the heading of embarrassment of riches,” Greenblatt said. “There’s just so many shows that we have scheduled or ordered.”

Greenblatt called the soapy Cruel Intentions “a bit of an outlier for us, because there’s no other show like it in our list of genres.”

That statement was interesting as one of NBC’s goals going into the 2015-16 development season was to add a primetime soap — a genre that is not on the network right now — to its lineup. NBC ordered two such pilots, Cruel Intentions and legal soap Miranda’s Rights, which is dead.

Still, “we like it, and we’re still discussing it and trying to figure it out,” Greenblatt said of Cruel Intentions, which comes from Sony TV, the studio that produces NBC’s The Blacklist and its upcoming spinoff as well as hot new time-travel drama Timeless. 

As we reported, among the possible scenarios discussed for Cruel Intentions are a summer order at a lower licensee fee or redevelopment. The latter is hard to imagine as it may be difficult to secure Gellar again, and she is a main draw to the sequel.

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