Castle Rock season 2 is officially a go over at Hulu! The streamer didn’t even need to wait for the aggregate number for season 1, which premiered on 25th July. Indeed, the weekly series – on the eve of episode 6 of 10 in the US – has already procured a season 2 renewal. However, the details pertaining to the release time table are not yet known.
The entire Castle Rock season 1 creative coalition are set to return for season 2. They consist of executive-producers in Stephen King himself, along with Bad Robot’s J.J. Abrams and Ben Stephenson. Developers Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason will also continue in their capacity as showrunners and executive producers.
The reason for the renewal of the Maine-set small town mystery series is quite simple, since Hulu cites that Castle Rock is its most successful (consumption-wise,) first-season original launch, also providing the outlet’s highest view-through rates. Moreover, the series has been a bountiful boon for the ever-expanding Stephen King live-action universe, which is about to surge in an unprecedented capacity with an insane array of movies and television projects.
Interestingly, Castle Rock is giving Marvel Studios a run for its money as far as shared universe dynamics are concerned. The series showcases familiar King concepts like Scott Glenn’s role as Castle Rock sheriff Alan Pangborn of King novels like The Dark Half and Needful Things (which had a 1993 movie in which Ed Harris played the character), Shawshank State Prison (the setting of a certain Oscar-nominated 1994 film,) and the consequential last name of Jane Levy’s Jackie Torrance (who’s confirmed to be related to The Shining’s Jack Torrance). Even the idea of Bill Skarsgård – who’s killing it on the big screen as King’s horrific harlequin, Pennywise, in It and its upcoming sequel – playing a different role in the King Universe is interesting overall.
Pertinent to the idea of building the King Universe in a diverse, yet interconnected way, Castle Rock will ultimately prove itself to be an anthology series, since Dustin Thomason – who developed the series with Sam Shaw, along with J.J. Abrams – revealed how each season will tell a self-contained story, meaning that season 2 will likely brandish a new cast of characters. As Thomason recently explained to our US chums:
“The basic idea is that it is an anthology in the sense that we’re going to tell a new story that gives you a different lens into Castle Rock and into Stephen King each season. The thing we’ve always been really excited about, in the same way that the Stephen King universe operates, is that each story will stand alone, but that we will be circling back to characters whose stories intersect with the new stories.”
Castle Rock season 1, which stars Andre Holland, Melanie Lynskey, Bill Skarsgard, Jane Levy and Sissy Spacek, is rolling out on a weekly basis on Hulu, heading toward its finale on 12th September, stateside.