Nobody enjoys a faithful Stephen King adaptation more than Stephen King, with the author almost always preferring the live-action takes on his work that stick as close to the source material as possible. After all, if you were to take a survey, then surely there wouldn’t be a huge number of people to echo his sentiments that the 1997 miniseries version of The Shining is superior to Stanley Kubrick’s undisputed horror classic.
King’s back catalogue has been relentlessly mined for inspiration by Hollywood for well over 40 years now, so it was inevitable that the consistency would be all over the place. We’ve seen several all-time greats based on his writing like The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Carrie and Stand by Me, but there’ve been more than a few stinkers as well.
The Dark Tower in particular stands out as one Stephen King blockbuster that bungled the source material pretty spectacularly, leading many to deem the books as unfilmable all along. That might be true, or it could be that a better and more experienced director than the relatively untested Nikolaj Arcel would have proven a safer pair of hands.
In any case, King recently claimed that none of his works can be called unfilmable, and it all depends on the person steering the ship towards whatever form the project ends up taking.
“Be all the way in, as much as possible, or be all the way out. There’s been a lot of projects where it’s like step back, write books, maybe something will come along, a passion project, and this was that, a passion project. I don’t think anything is unfilmable now.”
The 73 year-old’s comments came as he was discussing Apple TV+’s upcoming series Lisey’s Story, and Stephen King will definitely approve of this particular adaptation given that he’s writing the scripts himself, which guarantees it’ll hew as close to his words as possible.