EXCLUSIVE: After scoring the big deal at the Toronto Film Festival with Neon for Audience Award winner The Life of Chuck, director Mike Flanagan and Stephen King are right back at it. The Dish hears their next collaboration will be Carrie, this time in an 8-episode series for Amazon. Flanagan will be the show runner.
The 1974 novel put the young author King on the map, and also bolstered his worth as an author whose genre storytelling was most translatable to the big screen. Brian De Palma was the first director to adapt King’s coming of age story of a young sheltered girl with a domineering mother whose bullying caused unimaginable blood-soaked consequences due to her hyperkinetic powers. Sissy Spacek played the title character, and John Travolta, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, Betty Buckley and William Katt also starred. After that 1976 hit, several follow-ups came later, including The Rage: Carrie 2, a 2002 telepic, and a 2013 remake that starred Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore.
This would be the second recent deal in which one of King’s treasures would be given a longer storytelling road. A24 has Paul Greegrass and JH Wyman adapting King’s Fairy Tale into a series, after an earlier attempt to mount it as a movie at Universal made them realize there was just too much story to pack into one feature. The Gary Dauberman-directed Salem’s Lot was just released for Halloween.
Flanagan and Trevor Macy will be exec producers of the series. King, who famously options his literary properties for $1 with a short leash attached, has several film adaptations in the offing. The Long Walk, which King wrote at age 19 and which was published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, is going at Lionsgate with Francis Lawrence; Jack Bender is directing The Institute, and Edgar Wright is directing a new version of The Running Man, with Glen Powell playing the role originated by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Josh Brolin, Lee Pace, Katy O’Brian, Karl Glusman and Daniel Ezra also starring. King wrote that under the Bachman non de plume, and I can remember how exciting it was to all of us who devoured the author’s writing, that a whole bunch of others by him were there to be devoured anew.
Flanagan previously helmed Doctor Sleep, the sequel to King’s The Shining, and Gerald’s Game, and they have been knocking around the idea of doing a new version of The Dark Tower. WME reps Flanagan and King is repped by Rand Holston Management and Gang Tyre.
They’re opening a writer’s room, so this one’s happening quickly.
