For the first time, Alex Cross is coming to the small screen, and its creator and lead star promise they’re making it worth the binge when Cross arrives in full on Amazon Prime Video this November 14.
Whereas prior adaptations — two with Morgan Freeman as the title character and one by and with Tyler Perry — were feature-length movies and subject to the attendant time constraints, Cross as a show gives the creatives and cast the opportunity to run in several different narrative directions throughout its eight-episode arc.
“We really wanted to just expand on what had been seen, and I personally felt like we could have a huge advantage by doing it for television because that would give us more real estate so we can make the landscape bigger,” creator Ben Watkins told TV Insider of his preference for the new medium. “There’s a really important by-product of that: That means you don’t just get a thriller with all the twists and turns. That means you actually get to do a character story, a personal journey for Alex Cross.”
Indeed, in the official trailer for the series, we see that Cross is raising two children by himself after the death of his wife, and he’s grappling with his own grief as he attempts to solve the serial murder case(s) at hand. Even as he loses his grip, though, he’s got to rely on his mind more than ever to understand what kind of monster he’s dealing with.
For Watkins, a central priority for his new screen iteration of James Patterson’s iconic literary character was to make him less of a rote hero figure and more of a relatable person.
“I didn’t want to fall into the trap of having somebody so dynamic and so heroic that you only admire them and you don’t actually relate to them. I wanted you to be able to see a real person that has struggles and flaws — even things that they might not be able to overcome — because that’s like us in real life,” he explained. “I don’t know that the movies would have that opportunity because they only have a limited amount of time, and they might have to choose plot over character. We got to do both.”
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Aldis Hodge added that the team’s priority wasn’t necessarily to differentiate his portrayal of the titular character from those we saw before in Kiss the Girls, Along Came a Spider, and Alex Cross, but to bring him into a new era of the world itself: “It’s an extension of the Cross universe, and the choices that Ben made originally already put it in its own sort of ecosystem, with how he modernized it and brought it into today’s era, with how he displayed the narrative, with how he broke down sort of that fourth wall experience as we deal with the suspect killer and we get into the mind,” Hodge said. “So there were a lot of general differences that were already there present. So all we had to figure out was how do we want to expand, and how do we want to focus the audience on their new experience with this new sort of platform of a character that they’ve loved for so long?”
Audiences will find out exactly how the new Alex Cross breaks through when the show hits the streamer.
Cross, Season 1 premiere, November 14, Amazon Prime Video
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