Ron Howard wants Backdraft to be his next film adapted to television

Adapting movies into television series is all the rage, and director Ron Howard has had his fair share of projects make the jump to the small screen.

But if Howard got to choose which of his films to adapt next, he'd opt for 1991's Backdraft. "Backdraft would be really good," he tells EW. "Backdraft would be fun. You could get the scope and the intensity that we had to do all in-camera — now we could do it efficiently and safely."

The film stars Kurt Russell and William Baldwin as two feuding firefighter brothers who are forced to work together when a dangerous arsonist comes to Chicago. But Howard admits that some of those fire sequences were risky when they were filming them (anyone who ever did the Backdraft attraction at Universal Studios got a taste of the conditions).

"We were kind of on the borderline there when you throw the safety question into what we were doing," he says. "I was so relieved when we wrapped. But now I believe we could tackle it and be just as ambitious visually and be a little safer."

Universal Pictures/Getty; Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty

Jason Katims adapted Howard's 1989 film Parenthood into a hit for NBC, which went on to run for six seasons from 2010 to 2015. Howard and producer Brian Grazer's Imagine Entertainment acted as producers on the series (they also produced Katims' beloved Friday Night Lights, which Howard says he's always keen to see more of).

Most recently, Howard served as executive producer on another one of his beloved 1980s titles, Lucasfilm's Willow. The series received an expanded life on Disney+, with the first season teaming up the original character of Willow with the children of the 1988 movie's heroes.

But Howard has a long CV, and any one of his titles could be ripe for new life on a streaming platform (or even network television). To his mind, Backdraft would be a natural fit for that environment.

"It's a great world and there have been some shows around firehouses," he reflects. "There's something about a family of firefighters."

However, don't take that to mean it's already in development. "We're not actively working on it," Howard adds. "Although Brian Grazer talks about it from time to time, so maybe one of these days."

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