Mike Flanagan may have become Netflix’s go-to guy when it comes to crafting episodic television set in the horror genre, with the filmmaker having wrapped his latest effort Midnight Mass just a couple of months after The Haunting of Hill House follow-up The Haunting of Bly Manor was added to the content library, but he’s also proven to be rather fond of a Stephen King adaptation or two.
Flanagan’s first collaboration with the streaming giant saw him deliver the excellent Gerald’s Game, an impressive spin on a King story that many of the author’s fans had deemed unfilmable. After that he took on an even more daunting task by crafting a sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and while Doctor Sleep may have disappointed at the box office, it didn’t take long for the atmospheric chiller to find a second life as a cult favorite.
Shortly after the pic was released, Flanagan hinted that he was in the process of turning another of King’s works into a feature film, and he became officially attached to Revival earlier this year. However, in a recent interview with The Stand co-creator Josh Boone, who was also set to adapt the novel at one point, the Hush and Oculus director admitted that the project is dead.
“We got to go back and forth about Revival, being a project that Josh was doing first and then I also ended up not doing Revival. So we have that in common, we’ve both been through the ringer on that particular story. We should get together some day and share boards, and drafts, and scars. I kind of hit the same wall with it where it was just so expensive. Man, did I love it, though.”
He may have dropped out of another Stephen King adaptation with Revival proving too tough of a nut to crack, but Flanagan’s exclusive deal with Netflix is going to keep him busy for the foreseeable future. With Midnight Mass entering post-production now, the 42 year-old is set to dive into turning Christopher Pike’s novel Midnight Club into a streaming series as he continues to assert himself as small screen horror’s foremost auteur.
