Hollywood loves nothing more than Stephen King adaptations, looking at the sheer volume of movies and TV shows in the works based on the horror icon’s back catalogue, but Pet Sematary is evidently one of the favorites.
The first feature film version arrived in 1989 and hit big at the box office, leading to a sequel that released three years later. However, Pet Sematary Two was a follow up in name only, focusing on an all-new group of characters, which may have contributed to it bombing at the and leaving critics unimpressed.
Two years ago, Jason Clarke headlined a remake that hauled in over $113 million globally, despite generating a decidedly mixed response from both fans and reviewers. Of course, you can never keep a marketable property down for too long, and earlier this year it was confirmed that a Pet Sematary prequel had been placed into development, with Lindsey Beer set to make her directorial debut on the Paramount+ exclusive.
The first major piece of casting news has broken following the news that Jackson White is in final talks to play a younger version of Jud Crandall, embodied by Fred Gwynne in the original and Jon Lithgow in the remake, to give you an indication of how much younger the latest spin on the story is skewing.
Production is set to kick off in August, so the latest entry in the Pet Sematary series should be heading to streaming at some point next year. Plot details remain under wraps, but given that Crandall is the person in the story with the most knowledge of the secret burial ground that can resurrect the dead, it stands to reason that we’ll be finding out how he came to possess so much information.
