Hello there. I'm Paul Rea from the official Teen Wolf Wiki
and today we're going behind the scenes to take a look at the
writing process of Teen Wolf: The Movie,
and to see how different it will be from the TV show.
[phone rings]
“Hello?”
“Hello Jeff Davis, this is Paul Rea. How are you?”
“Paul, I’m good. How are you doing?”
“I’m doing very well, thank you very much.”
“Excellent, It’s nice to talk to you after so long. I know we email
here and there but, nice to hear your voice.”
One year ago this week I was talking to Jeff Davis by phone from Los Angeles.
He had just signed a deal to produce two new series for Viacom/CBS
and the idea of making more Teen Wolf seemed, at the time, impossible.
“It doesn’t look like it’s a possibility any time soon. Which I feel terrible saying
because I know there are so many fans out there who really want it.”
“It’s all about IP and the business affairs of two companies
is really what keeps it from getting made.”
“It’s all locked up.”
The story of how one Paramount Executive,
single-handed, cut through the Gordian knot of intellectual property rights
will have to wait for another day – but within a couple months of that phone interview with Jeff,
the deal for a Teen Wolf movie went from being impossible to moving forward on a very fast track.
And Jeff Davis found himself once again at the center of the supernatural universe he created.
*Original Artwork by Chan Vasquez
In November 2021, Jeff, Producer Joe Genier, Director Russell Mulcahy and Teen Wolf writer
Will Wallace gathered at Teen Wolf Headquarters in the San Fernando Valley to begin working out the story.
Their goal was to take Teen Wolf to the next level.
“The first ideas we had when we sat down to break this was ‘what can we do times 10?’ so with
Lacrosse, I always knew I wanted to do a Lacrosse game in a stadium full of thousands of people.”
“A lot of it was saying, ‘Okay. If it’s going to be in a movie,
if we’re going to be a feature-film-length story then everything needs to be doubled up.
Everything needs to be taken to a higher degree. I always take inspiration
from the director James Cameron who took the movie Alien and made it Aliens and gave you the queen.”
“It was a lot of let’s make it bigger. Let’s make
it as big as possible but still give it the characters and feel of Teen Wolf.”
And Jeff says “bigger” also means longer, more violent and a little bit naughty.
“The difference between streaming and just doing a regular TV show is pretty vast. For one,
we were always hampered by the time limit. We had to break things into six acts and they had to be
41 minutes and 30 seconds on the dot. So, we were cutting frames to try to get down to time.”
“With this, I’m telling the studio, this is probably going to be a two hour and 15 minute
movie, maybe two and a half hours? So, it’s going to be epic. And they’re like great.”
“The other thing is you get to up the violence, you’ll hear characters swearing
which is fun to do. You get a little bit more freedom and latitude with what you can do.”