Mike Flanagan Says He’ll “Always Pine” to Direct This Unmade Stephen King Movie
Mike Flanagan is a filmmaker who understands how to translate Stephen King’s work for the screen. Several creatives have taken a stab at adapting King’s work for the big and small screens. But few have been as consistently successful as Flanagan. His renditions of Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game won over fans and critics alike. And his latest King adaptation, The Life of Chuck, just won the prestigious People’s Choice Award at TIFF.
A track record like that cannot be a fluke. Flanagan deeply understands King’s output and knows how to translate it to the screen without losing the essence of the source material in the process.
In spite of Flanagan’s success with adapting King’s work, the beloved director missed out on the chance to bring King’s novel Revival to the big screen. He was developing that project with Warner Brothers, but the studio pulled the plug on Revival when Doctor Sleep fell short of projections.
Flanagan says Revival is the “project that got away.”
When Flanagan appeared at FAN EXPO Canada, he opened up to Screen Rant about the missed opportunity, saying:
“…I wrote a script off of Revival that I love. Man, is it dark. We did the ending and, if you’ve read it, it is one of the bleakest most chilling endings that King’s ever done – including Pet Sematary. It’s dark, but man did I love that script. When people ask me what the phantom limb is, what the project that got away is, it’ll always be Revival. I had written it for Warner Brothers right after we had been shooting Doctor Sleep, but Doctor Sleep didn’t work in the box office. I’m enormously proud of the movie, and I hear from fans that it seems to grow, but it didn’t perform to the studio’s expectations. And so a lot of the projects that we had at Warner Brothers died as a result, and Revival was one of them.
That’s a bummer that the project didn’t come to fruition. But the success of The Life of Chuck may renew interest in the project and Flanagan may be able to get the film made elsewhere at some point.
For more on Flanagan’s unmade adaptation of Revival, check out this episode of Dread Central’s own Development Hell podcast!
That’s all we have for you at present, dear reader. Stay tuned to the site for more behind-the-scenes anecdotes as we unearth them. Also, follow @DreadCentral on Twitter (X) so you never miss one of our updates.
Categorized:News
