The Stephen King business is booming. With IT crushing for Warner Bros. and The Dark Tower... well, opening for Sony, studios are looking to get back into King adaptations, which at one point dominated multiplexes for years. In addition to Gerald's Game on Netflix and Mr. Mercedes on television, the next King property to make its way to movie theaters will be an adaptation of The Talisman.
Variety has the story, stating that Josh Boone -- of New Mutants and The Fault in Our Stars -- has been tapped by producer Frank Marshall to write the screenplay for The Talisman, with a possibility that he'll stay on to direct. I wonder if a lot of that has to do with the success of New Mutants, which Boone is busy directing at the moment for a 2018 release. If that movie were too take off, Fox might want to keep him in the fold for another chapter of that mutant saga. Then again, The Talisman could beckon.
Written by Stephen King and Peter Straub in 1984, The Talisman follows a young boy named Jack Sawyer, whose mother is dying. Jack learns that he can cure his mom is he can acquire a talisman. But in order to retrieve it, Jack has to embark on a journey that will take him between our world and a parallel world (readers of King's Dark Tower series will recognize several properties of The Territories, a land that Jack must travel through). King and Straub actually reunited years later to pen Black House, a sequel that catches up with Jack as an older man, now working as a homicide detective. So if this first movie takes off, there's a framework in place for a second film (Just like IT.)
This could be the tip of the iceberg for Stephen King news in the realm of adaptations. Back in the day, King books like Cujo, Firestarter, The Shining and Misery fueled audiences' collective nightmares. King has stayed prolific over the years, meaning that many storytellers have the ability to convert more recent works of fiction. Or, as is the case with The Talisman (or IT), they can go back to old King works, blow the dust off of them, and give them a fresh coat of imagination paint.
We'll keep you updated on the progress of The Talisman as it comes together, even though it might take time to finally reach theaters. Josh Boone, as we mentioned, is occupied with New Mutants at the moment, and if he's just starting the screenplay (with an eye to direct), it could be years before we're actually able to watch the epic story unfold. In the meantime, visit our 2018 Movie Release Schedule to see which blockbusters will be in theaters next year.
