The last couple of years have seen a large number of remakes and reboots of film properties. From J. J. Abrams’ successful Star Trek remastery, to Rob Zombie’s powerful remake of the first two Halloween films, to Chris Nolan’s Batman Begins and its sequel. The last of the caped crusader flicks alone netted a cool $1 bil. Then there’ve been the more questionable remakes – Nightmare on Elm Street, anyone?
Variety reported that there are plans afoot to remake Stephen King’s 1980 novel Firestarter as a multi-picture enterprise. The 1984 original starred Drew Barrymore, and plans are set to make the character in the remake even edgier.
But that’s not all Stephen King fans. Remember King’s 1973 short story ‘Trucks’. It was one of the stories in an incredibly strong collection, Night Shift, which was made into an movie staring Emilio Estevez in 1986. Trucks was again made into a movie, this time for TV only, in 1997.
It should be interesting to see how these play out. Personally I’d love to see a few King properties remade, and though I like these two, I can think of others I’d like to see first. Though I like both versions of the The Shining (Kubrick’s powerful film with Jack Nicholson, as well as a more accurate-to-the-novel TV adaptation) I still think that that property could be remade and be much stronger, and likewise with the mini-series of IT. Tim Curry was great as a terrifying Pennywise the clown and I remember finding it all very scary indeed, and one of the better adaptations of King’s work. But again, I think this could be even better given the potential King’s awesome story has.
Ron Howard already has plans to bring King’s The Dark Tower epic to the big and little screens in an ambitious project that will see the first film hit cinemas in May 2013. The next few years will interesting indeed for fans of Stephen King. Not that they’re not already interesting of course.
