Hollywood has spent decades trying to figure out what to do with “The Birds.” Now it has an answer. A modern limited series take on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 horror classic is in development, and it comes with a name that immediately makes people pay attention.
Sarah Snook is attached to star. If that name rings a bell, it should. She won an Emmy for playing Shiv Roy on “Succession,” and last year she picked up a Tony for “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” She also led the Peacock thriller “All Her Fault.” In other words, she is not a casual choice. She is the kind of actress who signals that the people behind this project want it taken seriously.
The series is being shopped to buyers right now, so it does not have a home network or streamer yet. It comes from Universal International Studios and Heyday Television, with Tom Spezialy (“The Leftovers,” “Watchmen”) writing. Deadline broke the news on Friday, May 29.
Here is where things get interesting. This is not a beat-for-beat remake of the movie you remember. The series is described as a present-day reimagining set in Alaska, with a murder mystery at its center and a brand new lead character named Myra Massey. Spezialy is from Alaska, so the setting is personal to him.
The setup goes like this. Myra is a traveling magistrate who returns to her isolated Alaskan hometown for what she expects to be a routine presumptive death hearing. She thinks she is walking into a simple cold case. Instead she finds her childhood friend’s body, riddled with bullets. As she steps outside her role as a judge to dig into what happened, nature turns on her, and the bird attacks begin.
So the birds are still here. There will be a lot of them. But they are wrapped around a crime story rather than the slow-burn romance that anchored the original. That original, by the way, followed a socialite and a lawyer in Northern California as a coastal town came under siege by birds with no explanation. Hitchcock once called it the most terrifying motion picture he ever made. The film drew from Daphne du Maurier’s short story, and this new version pulls from both the movie and that source material.
People are right to be a little skeptical. The original is a landmark. It was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2016, and remaking something that beloved is a risk. It is also not the first attempt. A 2007 film remake with Naomi Watts and director Martin Campbell was announced and never happened. In 2017, the BBC tried to develop a miniseries written by Conor McPherson, and that one stalled out too. The new project itself has been quietly in the works for over a year.
What feels different this time is the approach. Rather than chasing the original’s exact plot, the team is building a new character and a new mystery around the same primal idea, which is the unsettling thought of nature suddenly turning against people. One detail stands out. Myra will not be a damsel in distress, a deliberate contrast with Tippi Hedren’s Melanie Daniels in the film. That shift alone tells you the creative team knows the conversation around the original and wants to do something of its own.
There is no release date and no network yet. The project is still finding its buyer. But with Snook leading and a fresh angle on a story everyone thinks they already know, “The Birds” might finally have found a way back that does not just photocopy the past. We will keep you posted as this one lands a home.
