“Heroes” hits its 20th anniversary this month with its long-promised sequel series nowhere close to the screen — sources now say Tim Kring’s “Heroes: Eclipsed” revival has quietly gone dark more than two years after it was first announced.

Key Points

• “Heroes” premiered on NBC on September 25, 2006, and its first season became what ComicBook.com called “a pop culture juggernaut,” even as later seasons saw diminishing returns.
• Original creator Tim Kring and Universal Television were developing “Heroes: Eclipsed” as a sequel following a new generation of evolved humans, announced back in 2024.
• A source told journalist Matt Webb Mitovich the project is “not active now,” reporting picked up by both ComicBook.com and Bleeding Cool this summer.
• It’s the first real update on the project’s status in two years, and Bleeding Cool notes the silence itself is “concerning” even if the show isn’t formally cancelled.
• This isn’t the franchise’s first stall: a 2015 limited series, “Heroes Reborn,” already tried and failed to relaunch the property with mixed reviews and soft ratings.

The original “Heroes” built its entire premise around ordinary people who wake up with superhuman abilities after a solar eclipse, tracking a cast that spanned a Japanese office worker who could bend time, a cheerleader who couldn’t be hurt, and a serial killer chasing other people’s powers. It was one of the first network dramas to treat serialized superhero storytelling as mainstream, appointment TV — arriving a full two years before “Iron Man” made Marvel a movie-studio juggernaut, and helping set the stage for the genre’s dominance over the following decade.

“Eclipsed” was supposed to pick up that story years later, with a new set of powered people running into old and new threats trying to stop human evolution in its tracks. Instead, the timing is almost ironic: the news that the revival has stalled broke just weeks before the original show’s 20th-anniversary month, leaving fans with an anniversary to mark and no new episodes to watch it with.

None of this erases what “Heroes” meant to appointment television in the mid-2000s, back when a hit drama could still pull in tens of millions of live viewers a week. Whether “Eclipsed” ever actually airs or quietly disappears the way “Heroes Reborn” faded from conversation, the original series’ DVD box sets and eclipse-symbol collectibles remain some of the more overlooked artifacts of that decade in TV.

The original cast — Milo Ventimiglia, Hayden Panettiere, Masi Oka, Zachary Quinto and Ali Larter among them — turned the show’s swirling-eclipse logo into one of the more recognizable pieces of mid-2000s network branding, printed across everything from comic-book tie-ins to Halloween costumes. That kind of merchandising footprint is part of why a revival still gets floated every few years, even as the actual scripts stay stuck in limbo.