Paul Giamatti’s Hostel series is dead — Eli Roth reveals Peacock’s blunt rejection

For those who were buzzing about seeing a proper Hostel series on telly with Paul Giamatti front and centre, it's bad news: the project is officially dead at Peacock. Yes, the streamer that will seemingly hand out a green light to just about any horror IP has given this one a hard pass, despite Eli Roth himself writing, producing, and lining up to direct the whole thing. If you thought this would finally be the Giamatti–Roth nightmare team-up we should have got ages ago, I'm with you.

The Rise and Quick Fall

Let me spell out how this all went down, as it's surprisingly convoluted for what sounded, at face value, like an obvious get. News first dropped back in 2024 that Roth and Chris Briggs were scripting a Hostel series—meant as an 'elevated thriller', apparently, because just butchering backpackers in Europe somehow isn't prestige enough these days. Giamatti was in talks to lead, which is the sort of eyebrow-raising casting that tends to get a streamer salivating.

• Hostel TV project announced: 2024
• Planned home: Peacock
• Writers: Eli Roth and Chris Briggs
• Star: Paul Giamatti (yes, really)
• Executive producers: Roth, Briggs, and Mike Fleiss
• Studio involved: Fifth Season (the Severance lot)
• Cancellation confirmed: August 2026

For context, Giamatti nearly did a cameo in the original Hostel film all the way back in the mid-2000s when he and Roth were both knocking about Prague. That never happened—busy schedules—but this was supposed to be their reunion. Obviously, someone upstairs at Peacock wasn't nostalgic.

The word of the show's demise itself actually slipped out in an interview Roth gave on YouTube in early August 2026. He confirmed the series wasn't moving forward, and he genuinely seemed blindsided:

Here's Roth, plain as day, on the phone to interviewer Edward Douglas:

Peacock said no. They’re not gonna do it. We were surprised and that’s their decision.

The Franchise That Simply Won't Die

The original Hostel dropped in 2005—Roth wrote and directed, introducing us all to the Elite Hunting Club where the rich pay good money for a bit of torture tourism. Sequels followed: Roth was back to direct Hostel: Part II in 2007, then Hostel: Part III landed in 2011 (that one got shipped off to Las Vegas, and Roth sat that out, leaving it to Scott Spiegel).

After years in cold storage, the idea was to bring it back for streaming, with Roth leading on scripts and Giamatti as his big draw. Instead, we've got another stack of scripts and nothing to show. But Roth, to his credit, isn't giving up on more Hostel just yet. In the same interview, he made it clear there might still be life in this old franchise:

Chris Briggs and I wrote the scripts and we love them, and I definitely want to turn them into something. So it might not be a TV series, but I still want to continue Hostel.

Where the franchise goes from here is anybody's guess. Nothing else has been greenlit, no other network or streamer has snatched up the project, and the scripts sound like they're still gathering dust while Roth figures out a new angle.