Sarah Snook Leads HBO’s ‘The Birds’ Series: Hitchcock’s Classic Heads to Alaska, and Everything We Know

Alfred Hitchcock's birds are coming back to roost, and this time they're heading north. HBO has picked up a limited series inspired by The Birds for development, with Emmy and Tony winner Sarah Snook attached to star and executive produce and Tom Spezialy , a veteran of HBO's The Leftovers and Watchmen , writing the pilot. Deadline broke the news on October 27, 2026, describing the project as a "visceral, present day reimagining" of the 1963 classic, relocated to present-day Alaska and rebuilt around a murder mystery.

That matters for a simple reason: Hollywood has been trying and failing to remake The Birds for almost two decades. A Naomi Watts film fell apart. A BBC series from the same producer now attached to this one never happened. This is the furthest a new version has gotten in years, and it's landing at the network that has quietly become one of horror's best homes on television. Below, we break down everything confirmed, the people behind it, the long and messy history of remake attempts, and what an Alaskan murder mystery with killer birds could mean for HBO's growing horror slate.

Is There a Trailer?

Not yet, and there won't be for a while. The series is in development, which means HBO has a pilot script in hand but has not formally ordered the show to production. No footage exists, no directors have been named and no cast beyond Snook has been announced. We'll update the moment HBO releases a first look. In the meantime, here's a reminder of the image the new series has to live up to: Tippi Hedren under attack in the original 1963 trailer.

Photo: Tippi Hedren in the 1963 trailer for The Birds , via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).

The Details: Everything Confirmed So Far

Here is what the trades have confirmed about HBO's The Birds :

• Network: HBO, as a limited series. It is in development, not yet greenlit, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
• Studios: HBO and Universal Global Television are co-studios. Universal's film side made Hitchcock's original, and Variety reports Universal Pictures and the Daphne du Maurier estate control the rights.
• Star: Sarah Snook as Myra Massey. Snook also executive produces.
• Writer: Tom Spezialy wrote the pilot and executive produces.
• Producers: David Heyman and Danny Samit for Heyday Television, Heyman's joint venture with Universal, plus Jennifer Gabler Rawlings of Omni Artists.
• Setting: Present-day Alaska, Spezialy's home state. He was born in Anchorage.
• Not announced: episode count, directors, additional cast, production start and premiere window.

The story is new. Per the official logline reported by Variety and Deadline, Myra flees a bitter custody battle and returns to her hometown with her young daughter. While quietly looking into the suspicious disappearance of a childhood friend, she finds herself tangled up with a killer on the loose and with what Variety's report calls "vicious, deadly bird attacks inexplicably tied to the crime." So this isn't Melanie Daniels driving lovebirds up the coast to Bodega Bay. It's a single mother, a missing friend, a small town that clearly knows more than it's saying, and a sky that has turned hostile.

Who's Behind It

Sarah Snook

Most viewers know Snook as Shiv Roy, the role that won her the 2024 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series and Golden Globes in 2022 and 2024 across 39 episodes of HBO's Succession. Since then she has gone on a remarkable run. She played all 26 roles in a one-woman stage version of The Picture of Dorian Gray , winning the Olivier Award in London in 2024 and the Tony Award on Broadway in 2025. She then starred in and executive produced Peacock's 2025 thriller All Her Fault , which earned her a Critics' Choice Award plus Golden Globe, Emmy and SAG nominations.

Horror fans have seen her before, too. She led the Southern Gothic ghost story Jessabelle (2014), played a fiendishly tricky dual role in the time-loop sci-fi cult favorite Predestination (2014), appeared opposite Helen Mirren in the haunted-house film Winchester (2018), did a Black Mirror episode ("Men Against Fire") and both starred in and executive produced Netflix's 2023 horror-thriller Run Rabbit Run , playing a mother whose daughter begins to change in frightening ways. That last one is worth noting: a mother protecting a child from something she can't explain is clearly territory Snook wants to be in, and Myra Massey sounds like a sharper, bigger-budget version of it.

Tom Spezialy

Spezialy has a long résumé that started in comedy ( Parker Lewis Can't Lose , Weird Science ) and moved through Desperate Housewives , where he was an executive producer and writer. The genre credits are what jump out here. He was a writer and executive producer on The Leftovers , a Peabody winner, and on HBO's Watchmen , which won 11 Emmys including Outstanding Limited Series in 2020. He also worked on Hulu's Stephen King anthology Castle Rock , the pilot of Starz's Ash vs Evil Dead and Prime Video's upcoming Blade Runner 2099. In short, he's spent the last decade inside prestige TV built around unexplained catastrophes, which is exactly the muscle a modern The Birds needs.

David Heyman

Heyman produced all eight Harry Potter films and is a producer on HBO's upcoming Harry Potter series, so he already has a direct line into the network. More importantly for this project, he's been chasing The Birds for nearly a decade. That persistence is a big part of why this version exists.

Photo: Tippi Hedren and Alfred Hitchcock in the teaser for The Birds , via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).

The Backstory: 70 Years of Birds, and 20 Years of Failed Remakes

It all starts with Daphne du Maurier, the Cornish author of Rebecca. Her story "The Birds" first appeared in 1952 in the collection The Apple Tree. It's set in Cornwall shortly after World War II and follows Nat Hocken, a disabled veteran working part-time on a coastal farm, as flocks of birds lay siege to his family's cottage. Du Maurier reportedly got the idea after watching a farmer get mobbed by gulls while ploughing. Critics have long read the story as a product of postwar British anxiety: air raids, a government that can't protect you, and threats breaking into the home.

Hitchcock kept almost nothing but the premise. Screenwriter Evan Hunter moved the action to Bodega Bay, California, and built it around socialite Melanie Daniels, played by Tippi Hedren in her film debut, alongside Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette and a young Veronica Cartwright. The film opened on March 28, 1963, on a $3.3 million budget and grossed about $11.4 million. Ub Iwerks earned an Oscar nomination for special effects for a film with roughly 370 effects shots, and its final image alone is a composite of 32 elements. The AFI ranked it No. 7 on its list of the 100 most thrilling American films, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2016.

The follow-ups have been rough. The Birds II: Land's End (1994), a made-for-TV sequel with new characters, was so poorly received that director Rick Rosenthal took the Alan Smithee pseudonym. Hedren appeared, but in a different role.

Then came the remake era, which never actually produced a remake:

• 2007: Universal announced a feature remake with Naomi Watts set to star, Martin Campbell ( Casino Royale ) directing and Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes producing. Directors Dennis Iliadis and later Diederik Van Rooijen were attached over the following years before it stalled for good.
• August 2017: The BBC announced a TV version from Heyman's Heyday Television, written by Irish playwright Conor McPherson, who had already adapted the story for Dublin's Gate Theatre in 2009. That version stuck closer to du Maurier, staying in postwar Cornwall with a farmhand at its center. It never got made.
• May 2026: Deadline reported Snook was set to lead a new limited series from Spezialy, Heyday and Universal. JoBlo noted the project had already been in the works for about a year by then, and Heyday's Sue Gibbs had previously said it would draw on du Maurier's story rather than directly remake the film.
• October 27, 2026: The package lands at HBO.

Analysis: Why This Version Might Actually Fly

The past attempts all stumbled on the same problem: what do you do with The Birds once the central shock is common knowledge? Everyone knows the birds attack. The Watts film was going to be a bigger, louder version of the same thing, and that's a hard sell when your effects are competing with the memory of a film that did it with real birds and matte paintings. The BBC version tried to go back to the source, which is admirable but tough to stretch across a season.

Spezialy's version solves it by making the birds a symptom instead of the whole story. Bolting on a missing-person mystery gives the show an engine that can run for several episodes, and it puts the question of why right at the center. Hitchcock famously never explained the attacks, and that ambiguity is a big part of why the film still unsettles people. The logline's suggestion that the attacks are tied to a crime is the riskiest choice here. Explain too much and you've made a supernatural procedural. Explain too little and viewers who signed up for a mystery will feel cheated. Spezialy's time on The Leftovers , a show that refused to explain its central event and was praised for it, suggests he knows how to walk that line.

Alaska is a smart move, too. Isolation is horror's oldest friend, and the state comes built-in with endless daylight or endless dark depending on the season, small towns with one road out, and massive seabird colonies. It also neatly echoes True Detective: Night Country , HBO's 2024 season set in a fictional Alaskan town that paired a crime investigation with creeping supernatural dread. That season became the most-watched in the anthology's history at the time, which surely isn't lost on HBO executives looking at this pitch.

Then there's HBO's broader horror strategy. The network has built a serious genre lineup: The Last of Us , The Outsider , Lovecraft Country and, most recently, IT: Welcome to Derry , which HBO renewed for a second season this summer, according to Fangoria. Pairing a beloved horror IP with a prestige star and a limited-series format is exactly the formula that has worked for the network, and it lines up with what's happening across TV right now. Just this week, Apple TV added Bill Nighy to Alfonso Cuarón's cult series Ascension , and MGM+ cast Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in The Black Tapes. Star-led, mystery-driven horror is the TV trend of the moment, and The Birds brings name recognition that few original concepts can match.

The stakes are real, though. Remaking Hitchcock has a poor track record: Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot Psycho (1998) remains a punchline. The encouraging precedent is A&E's Bates Motel , which ran five seasons by treating the original as a starting point, not a blueprint. The more this new The Birds commits to being an Alaskan mystery that happens to have birds in it, the better its odds.

What We Still Don't Know

• Will HBO greenlight it? Development is not a series order. Plenty of HBO projects with big names attached never make it past this stage.
• How many episodes, and who directs? Neither has been announced. A strong genre director would tell us a lot about the tone.
• How much of du Maurier survives? Earlier statements from Heyday pointed toward the original story. It'll be interesting to see whether any Nat Hocken DNA, like the boarded-up house or the radio going quiet, makes it into Myra's story.
• Practical or digital birds? The 1963 film's mix of real and mechanical birds is part of its legend. Fans will be watching closely to see how much the new version leans on CG flocks.
• Who else gets cast? Myra's daughter, the missing friend and the townspeople are all major roles still open.

Bottom Line

After nearly 20 years of false starts, The Birds finally has a real shot at coming back, with one of the most decorated actors working today, a writer who knows how to keep a mystery unsolved and a network that knows how to make horror feel prestigious. It's still only in development, so don't clear your calendar yet. But this is the most promising version anyone has put together, and turning it into an Alaskan whodunit is a smart way to avoid the trap every other attempt fell into.

Now we want to hear from you: should HBO explain why the birds attack, or keep Hitchcock's mystery intact? And is Sarah Snook the right lead? Tell us in the comments.

Related on The Horror Feed

• Bill Nighy Joins Alfonso Cuarón's Cult Horror Series 'Ascension' at Apple TV
• Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Leads MGM+'s 'The Black Tapes'
• Mike Flanagan's 'Carrie' Renewed for Season 2 at Prime Video

Header photo: Sarah Snook, photographed by Philip Romano, via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added.

Sources: Deadline, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, JoBlo, JoBlo (May 2026), Dread Central, /Film (2017), Fangoria, Wikipedia: The Birds (film), Wikipedia: The Birds (story), Wikipedia: Sarah Snook, Wikipedia: Tom Spezialy.