Joy for the Constant Reader: Upcoming Stephen King Adaptations Part 2: Television

This month, we’re doing the second part of the monster Stephen King adaptation news! If you missed the post about upcoming King movies, you should go read! The television adaptation list isn’t quite as long, but stay with it. There are some interesting things at the end!

Let’s jump right in.

Definitely On

Castle Rock

Oh man, I am excited for this one! Probably out of all the adaptations in these two posts, this is the one I’m looking forward to most. And they just announced the release date: July 25!

Castle Rock will be produced by JJ Abrams for Hulu. Constant Readers of King’s know Castle Rock, Maine, very well as it’s a regular setting for many of his books and short stories, including The Dark Half, Cujo, and It, which broke box office records when released as a film last year.

King writes in a giant multi-verse where everything is connected. Castle Rock will explore a lot of those connections. You can see this interconnection in the trailers below which mention many of King’s works outright, with subtle mentions of others: Needful Things, The Shining, Salem’s Lot, and The Shawshank Redemption.

Casting for Castle Rock looks amazing (see the trailer above), but what I found especially wonderful is that there are several alums from previous Stephen King adaptations. Bill Skarsgård plays a prisoner in Shawshank State Penitentiary. Most people know that he put in a fantastic performance in It as Pennywise, where he did Tim Curry proud.

Melanie Lynskey, who plays Castle Rock character Molly Strand, had a main role in the miniseries Rose Red, which aired on ABC in 2002. Terry O’Quinn, who many people know from Lost, played Sheriff Joe Haller in Silver Bullet, the 1985 adaptation of King’s novella Cycle of the Werewolf. In Castle Rock, O’Quinn portrays Dale Lacy, another of the main characters.

And, Sissy Spacek joins the cast as the mother of one of the main characters, Henry Deaver (played by André Holland). Spacek played the title character in King’s Carrie, of course, which was both his first published novel and the very first adaptation of any of his work. I feel like that is poetic!

I will be watching Hulu this summer! How about you?

Also, I couldn’t decide which of these two trailers to post, so I went with both of them! Here’s the second!

The Dark Tower: Wizard and Glass

A lot of fans were disappointed by last year’s movie adaptation of The Dark Tower. King’s magnum opus is just too large to put into a two hour movie. But even with the less-than-stellar showing at the box office, it looks like The Dark Tower television adaptation is still green-lit.

The TV show, which will be released by Amazon, will focus on the fourth book in the series, Wizard and Glass, which is something like Roland’s origin, told within the larger Dark Tower story. It focuses on Roland’s past: his ka-tet with his childhood friends, Cuthbert and Alain, and their battle with the Man in Black and how the world ultimately moved on.

Idris Elba was originally slated to reprise his role as Roland, but there are rumors that with the poor box office numbers of the movie, the production company wants to distance the television adaptation from the movie adaptation. And there has been very little in the way of official announcements about the show, which was said to have been filming in 2017 for release in 2018.

So while I believe this series is very likely to come out, the details are still unclear and I don’t imagine it’s going to be released in 2018, as originally planned.

Sleeping Beauties

Well before the book King co-authored with his son, Owen, hit the shelves, the television rights had been snapped up. There has not been much news on it recently, but Michael Sugar and Ashley Zalta are executive producers, both very strong names for themselves.

Sleeping Beauties is something of a post-apocalyptic story. A mysterious virus makes all the women go to sleep and a cocoon-like gauze enshrouds them. If they are woken, they become violent and feral. But there are a few women who don’t succumb to the disease. This book is still on my To Be Read shelf, so I don’t have a lot of comment on the story itself.

The book spent several weeks at the top of the NYT Bestseller’s list, so I’m hopeful that this is going to come through.

The Bone Church

This may not be familiar to a lot of people. The Bone Church is a narrative free-verse poem originally written in the ‘60s, when King was in college. That version is lost, but a re-written version was published in Playboy in 2009, and later collected in the anthology The Bazaar of Bad Dreams in 2015. The poem is a first-person account, told in a bar for payment in drinks, of a jungle expedition to find the famed Bone Church, from which only a few of the original thirty participants returned.

No word yet on casting or timeframe, but it’s possible that the show might be headed to Netflix. This is pure speculation on my part based on Cedar Park Entertainment having acquired the rights. Cedar Park is owned by Chris Long and David Ayer. Long has worked with both King and Netflix as executive producer on Mr. Mercedes, which aired last year to good reviews. Ayer has a tight relationship with Netflix after directing Bright, Netflix’s highest-viewed film, and Suicide Squad. He has been tapped to write and direct Bright 2. So perhaps we’ll see The Bone Church at Netflix!

The Stand

Okay, I’m putting this here, even though there’s been a lot of unfulfilled reassurances about a new adaptation. First, it was going to be a movie. Then it was going to be four movies. Then a miniseries for television. After that it was going to be a full, on-going TV series… And then a movie again.

But now, as of an offhand mention in an industry report in April, of Josh Boone (The Fault In Our Stars) still being on board for directing The Stand. This would have felt like every other random update about this adaptation, except for the added bit of it being developed as a 10-hour series for CBS All-Access. That’s a pretty high level of detail. So it seems as if this one is on.

I’ll admit to being a little disappointed that a network is developing it though. I would have much rather seen Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu take it on. But I suppose we should take what we can get, right?

Maybe

8

8 is based on King’s novella called “N.,” which is included in his collection Just After Sunset. It’s a creepy story about obsessive-compulsive disorder and monsters from another world. There seems to be some talk about the show being a bit different than the novella by mirroring the “kids face evil and come back as adults to face it again” trope that is seen in It, which was not an original trope in the written novella. We will see how that turns out.

There hasn’t been much news on this adaptation since autumn 2017.

The Things They Left Behind

This one might be better listed on the “Long Shot” section that I’m not putting in this post. But let’s have a peek anyway, shall we?

“The Things They Left Behind” is a short story originally found in the collection Transgressions, Vol. 2, which featured short stories by King and author John Farris, and later collected in King’s Just After Sunset (we’re seeing this one a lot lately, huh?). It’s the story of a survivor’s guilt after 9/11. Random things belonging to people who perished in the Twin Towers begin to appear in the survivor’s apartment, and he must figure out what is going on. Pretty classic Stephen King.

Apparently, though, the proposed series seems different, with “two investigators carrying out the unfinished business of the dead.” Not quite the same.

If you took the link above, you’d see that article is dated back to 2014, so it’s pretty old. This is why I noted that this one is probably a long shot.

Bonuses!

I promised you interesting things and I absolutely keep my promises! First, some updates to last month’s post about movie adaptations, since a couple things have dropped in the last few weeks.

The Tommyknockers

Apparently Universal Studios has won rights to James Wan’s adapation of The Tommyknockers. You might remember, if you’re a King fan, the terrible miniseries from the 90s based on the same novel. It’s probably one of King’s worst books (he even says it’s bad), so I’m sort of flabbergasted that getting The Stand going has taken forever, but there’s a bidding war over The Tommyknockers. It seems ridiculous to me. But we’ll have to keep an eye on it.

The Long Walk

This one I’m much more excited about. “The Long Walk” is a novella originally published under King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman. It was probably the best story that was released under this pen name. It’s a dystopian tale set in an authoritarian United States. If you’re a fan of The Hunger Games (and who isn’t, really?), this will feel reminiscent. I’m pretty convinced that Suzanne Collins got some inspiration from “The Long Walk,” as the novella is all about the annual event where one hundred teenage boys set out walking to see who can go the farthest. You can imagine what happens to the losers. This one is going to be coming from New Line Cinema and written by James Vanderbilt (The Rundown, Zodiac).

Okay, that’s all taken care of. Bonus number two! And man, am I down for this one!

Stephen King Movie and TV Collection

If you’re a fan, you’re definitely going to want to check this out. On June 12, the Stephen King Movie and TV Collection is going to be released on DVD. You can even pre-order it on Amazon right now. This collection will include the TV miniseries The Stand, Golden Years, The Dead Zone, The Langoliers (I actually haven’t seen that one!), Silver Bullet, Graveyard Shift, and Pet Sematary. There’s over 1000 minutes of screen King here! And it’s less than $20. You can bet I’ve already pre-ordered it! 🙂

Fade Away

Okay… I’ve only found this in one line of one article dated April 2017. But the line is: Owen King and his brother, fellow writer Joe Hill, are developing their original feature script Fade Away as a television series for Miramax and Miguel Sapochnik.

So we may be getting a series from the King brothers!

All right, that’s it. I’m done! Whew! That was a much bigger project than I was expecting, but I really enjoyed doing it. What do you think?

Personally, I’m going to be binge watching Castle Rock this summer! And I’ll be waiting with baited breath for The Stand! Are you going to tune in to any of the King television adaptations? Drop me a comment!