You look up prolific in the dictionary, and they may as well have Stephen King’s picture next to the definition.
Now he’s back with two works, Doctor Sleep, his sequel to The Shining, and 11/22/63, which Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) is slated to turn into a movie.
11/22/63 is scheduled to come out this November 8, and it’s about a teacher who travels back in time to try and stop John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
As we’ve reported previously on TG Daily, plans to make a three picture adaptation of King’s Dark Tower recently fell apart, but there’s still plans to make a multi-picture adaptation of King’s end of the world epic, The Stand, and with the success of Contagion, the time is right for disease ending the world stories.
As for Dr. Sleep, Deadline reports there were rumors of a Shining sequel going around in 2009, but King finally read from the story at an award ceremony at George Mason University. The basic plot as we know it is little clairvoyant Danny is all grown up now, and working with hospice patients, but then he has to deal with vampires crashing the party.
No word yet on whether anyone in Hollywood is circling Dr. Sleep to potentially turn it into a film, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets snapped up soon. With Demme making 11/22/63, there’s great potential for another great movie based on a King work.
King was happy with the first adaptations of his novels, Carrie and Salem’s Lot, but he was famously unhappy with Stanley Kubrick’s interpretation of The Shining, and these days, King has to like the movie based on his work, or you can’t use his name in the film or in the advertising. (1408 and The Mist were two recent movies based on King’s work that he allowed his name to be used for, the first two in quite some time actually.)
There have been great King adaptations, and a lot of crap ones as well, but King reconciled a long time ago that his books will remain the books, no matter what anyone does to them.
When George Romero once asked King how he felt about Hollywood “ruining” his books, King replied, “My books have not been ruined. They’re on the shelf right behind me. You can read ‘em if you want to.”
