Every Upcoming Stephen King Movie And TV Series

Stephen King has always been prolific, and it's astonishing to look back at his career and realize he's written more than 60 novels — most of them door-stoppers — and over 200 short stories. His gift for entertainment has never just stayed on the page, either. King adaptations are practically a business of their own, and business has rarely been better. No other author comes even close to the book-to-screen success that King has accomplished over the decades of his career. We've cataloged the highs and lows of King adaptations before, but now let's look at the ones we haven't seen yet. 

The official release dates of the various King adaptations are by no means set in stone, still, for fans of the master of horror, it's exciting to have such a wealth of new King movies and shows to look forward to. These are all the upcoming Stephen King movies and TV shows that fans can anticipate coming down the pipeline.

Stephen King has said before that Lisey's Story is one of his favorites of all his novels. The story hits close to home for him: "It's a story about love and marriage and the creative impulse," he told IndieWire. Now he's had a hand in its adaptation, writing every episode of the limited-run series. He calls it his "passion project," and that means we're more interested than ever.

Lisey's Story stars Julianne Moore as Lisey Landon, widow of famous author Scott Landon (Clive Owen). She has to grapple with tense, real-life horror that resurrects all the buried memories of their marriage: Filling in the gaps of their love story might save her life. The result is what director Pablo Larraín calls "a romantic suspense thriller with fantasy elements," which should ring true for fans of the book.

Lisey's Story starts airing on Apple TV+ in summer 2021.

Like Hulu's Castle Rock, EPIX's Chapelwaite is a Stephen King TV series that isn't exactly an adaptation. Instead, it's a prequel to his famous vampire novel, Salem's Lot. The series promises an unusual and exciting notion: 1850s Stephen King, a lavish blend of history and Gothic terror.

Adrien Brody stars as Captain Charles Boone, a widower who returns to his family home in Preacher's Corners, Maine, where he meets Rebecca Morgan (Emily Hampshire), an ambitious young author who hopes that serving as the Boones' governess will give her plenty of writing material. We're sure it will — especially since Charles and Rebecca are due to come face to face with mysteries and horrors that tie into their families' histories.

There's another family history involved here, too. The showrunners are brothers Peter and Jason Filardi, and Peter Filardi wrote the 2004 Salem's Lot miniseries. Like Charles Boone, he's coming back to familiar territory. Let's hope it goes better for him than it will for poor Charles.

Pet Sematary — Stephen King's harrowing novel of what happens when "sometimes dead is better" — has already had two big-screen adaptations, and soon streaming service Paramount+ will offer fans a prequel. Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Jeff Buhler, the producer and writer of the 2019 adaptation, will have a hand in shaping the new story. It's supposed to be an "origin story," so this may wind up being a historical along the lines of the Salem's Lot prequel Chapelwaite.

The upcoming Firestarter remake, directed by Keith Thomas, is all set to cover new territory. Thomas spoke to CinemaBlend about his appreciation of the original 1984 adaptation — its fidelity frees him to work on a remake that explores the book's themes without sticking so strictly to the text. He told CinemaBlend that while he's making changes, he thinks the results will be "explore [a lot] ... that King obviously is hinting at throughout the book." With a new direction that's inventive but still deeply involved with the original novel, the Firestarter remake is off to a good start.

Stephen King's novella The Gingerbread Girl is a tight, grueling, and suspenseful story about a grieving woman whose running route leads her into the path of a killer. It has all the ingredients of a good movie, which is why we're excited one is now in the works. The film will reunite King and Craig R. Baxley, who already has a number of King productions under his belt, including Storm of the Century, Rose Red, and Kingdom Hospital. The two are set to collaborate on a screenplay, and then Baxley will settle into the director's chair.

Sleeping Beauties is a 2017 novel co-written by Stephen King and his son Owen King, featuring an eerie premise where women begin suffering from a condition where they fall into a deep, cocooned sleep ... that takes their unconscious minds somewhere else completely. AMC is hoping to put together an open-ended series, and the network has already ordered a pilot scripted by Owen King. Full series pick-up will probably follow soon.

Mile 81 has a concept that will probably be familiar even to casual Stephen King fans: the evil car. The story's premise is diabolically simple. Drivers see what they think is a stranded automobile — an ordinary station wagon — and stop to help out the driver. Very, very bad idea.

Its film adaptation is in the hands of horror director Alistair Legrand. The officially released summary doesn't mention a car, which may mean the story is due to be tweaked in the telling. Either way, we know we're looking at a movie about strangers at a rest stop — in particular, a heroic kid named Pete — banding together to face down a dangerous mystery. And that sounds pretty good, even if we don't get another evil car out of it. Hey, we'll always have Christine.

Stephen King's The Dark Half is a story of what happens when a writer kills off his pen name ... only to find that identity taking on a murderous life of its own. It was adapted back in 1993 but mostly fell flat at the box office. Now, the novel is finding new life in unexpected hands: Alex Ross Perry's.

Perry's previous movies have included the emotionally raw Her Smell and the darkly comedic Listen Up Philip — a great director but a surprising choice. Perry's involvement, however, has our interest piqued. Even if he's not an obvious match for a Stephen King story, he has a knack for portraying complex emotions and getting fantastic performances from his actors, both of which should come in especially handy for tackling the psychological horror and identity issues of The Dark Half.

The Tommyknockers is a Stephen King novel even King has gone so far as to call "an awful book." But it's also a powerful story with a lot of hard-hitting themes, and it's clearly a book executive producer Larry Sanitsky is hooked on. In 1993, he helped produce the miniseries, and now he's serving as executive producer for the upcoming film.

Sanitsky still believes in the story wholeheartedly. The Hollywood Reporter quoted part of his mission statement: "It is an allegorical tale of addiction ... the threat of nuclear power, the danger of mass hysteria, and the absurdity of technical evolution run amuck. Topics as relevant today as the day the novel was written. It is also a tale about the eternal power of love and the grace of redemption." It's a strong pitch, and it's attracted some impressive talent. Horror veterans James Wan and Roy Lee are producing, and they've brought on screenwriter Jeremy Slater, the creator of the gone-too-soon TV version of The Exorcist.

They all know horror, and Lee even has two previous King productions under his belt. Slater knows how to script adaptations that show love for their sources but still move in new directions. That might be exactly the right recipe for adapting a book that's controversial even with its author.

Fans have waited a long time for an adaptation of The Talisman, the inventive dark fantasy novel co-written by Stephen King and Peter Straub. Now it's finally happening.

It's had a bumpy road in its progress towards the big screen. It started out as a planned TV adaptation. Then it became a movie that was going to be written and directed by Josh Boone (The Stand). At last, it seems to have settled down with a great combination: a Netflix series helmed by the Duffer Brothers (producers) and Curtis Gwinn (writer) of Stranger Things.

It's a great moment for Steven Spielberg, who loved the book so much that he got Universal to buy the rights for all time, so he'd always be able to have a hand in bringing it to life. He told Entertainment Weekly, "It's something that I've wanted to see come to theaters for the last 35 years ... I feel that in the very near future, that's going to be [my] richest collaboration [with King]." All those years of waiting are about to pay off.

We love the geeky thrill of two of our pop culture favorites colliding: a Stephen King book getting an Edgar Wright adaptation pretty much feels like a dream come true. It bridges a horror geek generation gap, bringing one of the best and funniest genre directors of recent years into collaboration with the veteran King of Horror. The best of both worlds.

Plus, this remake offers book fans a chance to forget about the notoriously unfaithful 1987 adaptation starring Arnold Schwarzenegger — Wright's already promised that he'll stick closer to the original story. He has a deft hand with both satire and gory violence, we're sure that The Running Man can finally get the brutal, darkly comedic cat-and-mouse adaptation it deserves.

In the family of Stephen King adaptations, Shudder's Creepshow series is something like a cousin: it's the offspring of the gleefully lurid Creepshow movie, which was a collaboration between Stephen King and George Romero. It borrows the movie's framework, which features the titular Creep introducing each episode's standalone tale via the Creepshow comic book, but most of its stories don't originate with King. But it's still part of the family. We're always delighted to see it, and 2021 will see a fresh batch of fun, spooky episodes.

Shudder has announced a handful of planned storylines, all of which sound promising. Keith David starring in a possible deal-with-the-devil drama that also involves an exterminator? Sign us up. And who doesn't want to see a "werewolf support group"?

The Institute may not qualify as a classic Stephen King novel in terms of when it was published, but it's still about as Kingian a novel as you can get: kids with special powers, sinister government agencies, horror, friendship, Maine, and more. It's fresh and new and capable of delivering a powerful hit of nostalgia, so it's not a surprise that someone bought the rights immediately.

A limited TV series is now in the works, with David E. Kelley and Jack Bender working on development. This isn't their first King adaptation: They both worked on the Mr. Mercedes TV series, something which clearly revved them up to return to Stephen King's playground. Their take on the book is sure to be rewarding, and we're already looking forward to settling down with a big bowl of popcorn: Let the classic thrills commence.

Some pending Stephen King adaptations have us excited; some have us intrigued. And at least one leaves us completely baffled.

Because Cujo, King's classic novel of a good dog gone rabid, has now become ... C.U.J.O., which apparently stands for "Canine Unit Joint Operations." Huh? Whatever it is, it's a far cry from the ordinary horror of a mother and son trapped in a hot car and menaced by a prowling dog. The remake might be taking on a science-fictional spin or maybe some kind of K-9 angle. All we know is that it's set to star DJ Perry and be directed by Lang Elliott, and Elliott has had his filmmaking career on pause for years. His lack of recent work makes it hard to predict his take on the source material, but it also makes his involvement intriguing: Something about this idea pulled him out of near-retirement, and we really want to find out what.

So ... C.U.J.O. Color Us Justifiably Obsessed with finding out where this is going.

The Shining is one of Stephen King's scariest novels, and it led to one of the best horror movies of all-time. And, like the guests of the haunted Overlook Hotel, the story won't stay dead — and fans don't want it to. King followed up on Danny Torrance's adult life with the sequel Doctor Sleep, which got an underrated adaptation helmed by director Mike Flanagan.

Now The Shining has come back to us again, this time in the form of the proposed HBO Max series Overlook. The official announcement was pretty bare bones, but the title suggests that we might be ditching the Torrance family and focusing on the hotel itself. The original novel hints at a long history of atrocities and horrors, so it's ripe with potential for a terrifying and sprawling prequel series. That's one direction Overlook could go in, and it's certainly something adaptations have considered before. Whatever happens, we can all relish the anticipation of the terrors to come.

"The Jaunt" is a short story that starts off as science fiction but ends as one of Stephen King's most terrifying works, and it has a real doozy of an ending: Barnes & Noble reviewer Sam Reader praised its "final, haunting line" as "both a cosmic joke and one of fiction's darkest examples of curiosity killing the cat."

Now "The Jaunt" will become a TV show. MRC Television — which already has King experience from producing HBO's The Outsider — has tapped Dave Erickson, co-creator of Fear the Walking Dead, to develop the story into a potentially open-ended series. As much as we're wondering how Erickson will expand the premise enough to carry a full show, we know fans will appreciate how a full-length Jaunt series echoes the story's key phrase: it's "longer than you think."

Stephen King's novel Joyland has a great setting — a down-at-the-heels '70s amusement park — and an equally great (and spooky) mystery. Those are two ingredients for a terrific TV show, so we're happy to say that Freeform has picked it up and a series is in the works.

Freeform's Karey Burke has shown great enthusiasm for the show's prospects: "We are honored to be working with Stephen King –- a master storyteller who understands the importance of culturally embedded tales that resonate with audiences on a deeply personal level." That sense of resonance is especially important for adapting a novel like Joyland, where memories haunt us just as much as ghosts. If the upcoming series gets that bittersweet pang right and knows how to aim for the heart, it's sure to stick with viewers.

Stephen King originally published "The Revelations of 'Becka Paulson" as a short story, and then he folded a version of it into The Tommyknockers, his novel of sinister alien influence. It was once a standalone Outer Limits episode. It's now entering its next and most surprising stage of life.

Ready for a surprise? "The Revelations of 'Becka Paulson" will become a CW series. The CW seems like an odd match for King, and it only gets odder from there.

At first, you might think the network is looking for Revelations to fill a horror niche formerly occupied by the long-running Supernatural, but the released concept for the series suggests they're going for something wildly different. Deadline reports the show's logline: "After accidentally shooting herself in the brain with a nail gun, a Pollyanna-ish Becca Paulson is recruited by an over-it Jesus to be his 'chosen one' in stopping the apocalypse. In order to save the world, Becca will have to prove that our deeply backward planet Earth is redeemable — starting with her quirky midwestern hometown." That's probably enough to outrage Stephen King purists, but we're still curious to see how this kind of tart, offbeat humor blends with King's original material.

So far, Katie Lovejoy (Dead Inside) is attached as executive producer and Maisie Culver (Last Man Standing) is a co-executive producer, who will also write the pilot.

Stephen King's "The Boogeyman" is an eerie, effective blend of psychological reasoning and that classic horror concept: the monster in the closet.

Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, who are working to bring a Boogeyman movie to the screen, already have experience tackling this kind of unease. They co-wrote A Quiet Place, an inventive and unsettling horror movie about people who must constantly stay quiet ... or die. They're enthusiastic about their new horror project — and so is Stephen King, who has already approved their proposed script. The Boogeyman is taking an appropriately shambling path towards completion, but we're ready to watch it. We'll just have to barricade our closet doors shut afterward.

Stephen King's short novel Elevation is now in the hands of Jack Bender, who is ready for a change of pace after working on darker King adaptations like Under the Dome, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. One of the things that attracts him to Elevation is that it's both a classically enjoyable King read and a genuinely uplifting read. He told CinemaBlend, "It's really about how we can all be better people. And it's a wonderful story. It's one of those little gems, and I felt that from when I first read it."

King has already signed off on Bender's script, so Bender is ready to move forward.

Thomas Jane has starred in a whole set of Stephen King movies — Dreamcatcher, 1922, and The Mist — and when he formed his own production company with Courtney Lauren Penn, they announced that Jane's King film streak could continue. They're going to adapt From a Buick 8, a novel about a group of Pennsylvania state troopers and the strange and dangerous car they find themselves guarding over the years. There's no rush on the project — Jane said on the podcast The Kingcast, quoted on /Film, that recent protests about police brutality make him lean towards putting such a cop-heavy story on hold — but we do know that Jim Mickle is attached to direct.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a 1999 novel that comes close to "Stephen King does YA," a scary and gripping story about a lost little girl who must evade The God of the Lost, a mysterious force stalking her through the woods. She has a tiny bit of wilderness survival knowledge and a lot of grit and determination.

The novel will be brought to the screen by director Lynne Ramsay, who has worked on a wide range of interesting films that should give her a great toolkit for tackling the story of a girl as tough and heroic as Tom Gordon's Trisha McFarland.

Stephen King's "The Little Green God of Agony" delivers a powerful hit of horror, especially for anyone who's ever had to contend with chronic pain. In the story, a rich man hires a kind of exorcist to rid him of his persistent, unbearable pain. His nurse believes he's just looking to get out of the hard slog of recovery, but over the course of one high-stakes night, she may change her mind.... Sounds like a good movie candidate to us!

All we know so far is that Lionsgate has put the story in the hands of Ian Goldberg (Fear the Walking Dead) and Richard Naing (The Autopsy of Jane Doe), who will co-write the script.

Fans have waited years for a film version of The Long Walk, Stephen King's dystopian novel about a competition where young men start out on a walk — and can't stop or slow down. Breaking the rules gets you shot, so they must walk or die until only one Walker remains. It's a simple premise that has nonetheless spent a long time eluding any attempts to put it on the screen.

But finally, it just might make it. Director André Øvredal (Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) has teamed up with screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Zodiac), and the two are determined to make their movie. Øvredal told Comingsoon.net, "This script was written on spec by James Vanderbilt when he did not even have the rights to it, he just wrote it out of pure love for the book and in the end, suddenly the rights were open and he was able to go to King with his script and say, 'Can we do this?'" That's the kind of devotion we like to see! And in fact, New Line bought the rights, so now they can do it. We can't wait until they do.

The most surprising Stephen King adaptation may be the proposed TV series The Bone Church, which is adapted from one of King's rare poems. At least it's a narrative poem, which means there's a story there to tell: one about a deadly jungle expedition, which could be thrilling in the right hands. And we have reason to believe the poem has actually landed in the right place. It's been acquired by Chris Long, who also worked as a producer on the hit show The Americans.

Stephen King's short story "Rest Stop," a brief but brutal tale of a writer who channels his darker pseudonym in order to intervene in an attack happening at a rest stop, will soon become a feature film. It's a particularly nice touch that it will be directed by Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell), who is also scheduled to make a new adaptation of The Dark Half — another King story about a violent pen name come to life. Perry has clearly found his King niche.

Salem's Lot, Stephen King's classic novel of vampires in a small Maine town, has already seen two miniseries adaptations. Now audiences will get to see it as a movie.

Horror icon James Wan will produce, and Gary Dauberman — who co-wrote both It and It Chapter Two, films that helped usher in a new boom period for King adaptations — will direct. The two have already worked with each other on the Annabelle franchise, so they're used to each other's styles, something that may mean Salem's Lot is in for a smooth trip through development.

HBO Max will soon offer viewers the high-octane thrill ride of Throttle, a movie adaptation of the short story co-written by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill. The story is a kind of homage of Richard Matheson's "Duel," which fans might also remember as a gripping TV movie that was one of Steven Spielberg's first projects. Clearly Throttle has a good pedigree behind it, and is there any way to go wrong with the story of a motorcycle gang vs. a menacing semi? We think not.

Stephen King's short story "Suffer the Little Children" is ultra-dark, especially at its conclusion, and it might be hard to film it successfully. But writer/director Sean Carter appears to be up to the challenge: "[It] fits right into that classic King paradigm: a tragically flawed lead character put into a shockingly unimaginable scenario. It's a tiny peek into a mythology that I can't wait to expand into a full-length movie," he told SyFy Wire.

Carrie is one of Stephen King's most adapted works, and it gains yet another take as FX starts developing a limited series based on the novel of the misfit telekinetic teenager. Intriguingly, FX may be looking to take a new approach to Carrie's social isolation: Collider's sources suggest that it's possible the new Carrie will get either a trans actress, an actress of color, or both. If so, that's an update that will let the series say new things about how high school society treats the people on its margins — and that's something that helps justify this novel getting another turn in the spotlight.

"Drunken Fireworks" is a Stephen King short story about neighbors exchanging hostilities via fireworks displays (already cinematic!). Producer Matt Rager is working to bring it to screen; it's possible the film will star James Franco, although there's been no news about it since 2016, and Franco has since faced lawsuits and sexual harassment allegations that may lead to him dropping out.

Stephen King's novel Rose Madder, which deals with both domestic violence and rich fantasy elements, has cycled in and out of the development process before. Lately, though, it's taken on new momentum: director Assaf Bernstein, whose work King admires, has now signed on to direct. Bernstein deliberately sought out the opportunity to make Rose Madder, so it may finally pick up the necessary momentum to make it to theaters.

Netflix will continue its run of Stephen King adaptations with Mr. Harrigan's Phone, a novella that features iPhone communication from beyond the grave. The film has an interesting combination of producers — the prolific and genre-bending Ryan Murphy, horror stalwart Jason Blum, and relative outsider Carla Hacken — and will be directed by John Lee Hancock.

Follow us on this: Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis is a novel in five stories, all of them centered on coming-of-age in the fifties and sixties and living through the aftermath. The 2001 movie Hearts in Atlantis was adapted from one of these stories, the novella "Low Men in Yellow Coats." Now Johannes Roberts will adapt the actual story "Hearts in Atlantis," which is part of the novel Hearts in Atlantis, and the movie will simply be called Hearts. Got it?

The third season of Mr. Mercedes will once again be back with viewers, even though its old home — AT&T network Audience — is now defunct. The first two seasons of the acclaimed Stephen King crime series were previously picked up by Peacock, but the third vanished with Audience's shutdown. But in 2021, Peacock will also acquire what King and director Jack Bender both consider its "best season yet."

Peacock has released a short trailer for the third season, and with the first two seasons are already available for streaming, this is the perfect time to catch up and get hooked.

HBO considers The Outsider, its adaptation of the Stephen King thriller of the same name, to be complete after one season: a limited-run series that confines itself to the events of the novel. But that doesn't necessarily mean the show is over. There are rumors that MRC, The Outsider's production company, is shopping the series around to see who might take it up on a second season.

And it's easy to see why someone would bite. The original story of The Outsider is wrapped up, but Stephen King's novella "If It Bleeds" features some of the same characters, offering material that a new season could easily pull from. Stephen King also confirmed with EW (quoted in Men's Health) that he's seen prospective season two scripts. It's all enough to have fans champing at the bit for more.