AMC has renewed its acclaimed Anne Rice adaptation for a fourth season, announcing the news during the show’s Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday. The new season will be titled Queen of the Damned, continuing the franchise’s tradition of renaming each season after the Anne Rice novel it adapts.
The announcement came just days after the Season 3 finale of The Vampire Lestat, which teased the return of Akasha, the original vampire at the center of Rice’s third Vampire Chronicles novel. Sheila Atim, who plays Akasha in The Vampire Lestat, was among the panelists on stage alongside Jacob Anderson, Assad Zaman, Eric Bogosian and executive producers Mark Johnson and Hannah Moscovitch.
Queen of the Damned is the third novel in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, following Interview With the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, and centers on Akasha, the ancient vampire queen whose awakening threatens the entire vampire world and beyond. The season will be showrun by Moscovitch, who wrote the Akasha and Gabriella characters in The Vampire Lestat and served as a writer on the first two seasons of the series. She will executive produce alongside Johnson and Rolin Jones, who showran Season 3 but will step back from that role for the new season.
“We can’t wait to continue the journey with Queen of the Damned, one of the most iconic stories in Anne Rice’s mythology, and watch our established and beloved characters confront Akasha with their world, and ours, very much hanging in the balance,” said Dan McDermott, Chief Content Officer of AMC Global Media and President of AMC Studios.
The series first premiered in 2022 as an adaptation of Rice’s 1976 debut novel, the second screen adaptation after the 1994 Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt film. Season 3 rebranded as The Vampire Lestat to reflect its adaptation of Rice’s second novel, following Lestat as an aspiring rock star whose interview with journalist Daniel Molloy forms the season’s backbone. Sam Reid, who plays Lestat, recorded 20 original songs for the season. The series is also notable for the 2002 Warner Bros. film Queen of the Damned, which starred the late Aaliyah as Akasha and grossed only $45 million after the original 1994 film had earned over $223 million.
A teaser for Queen of the Damned was dropped during the Hall H panel. A premiere date has not yet been announced.