Movies
Stephen King is Taking Back the Rights to Some of His Biggest Horror Stories!
As the Stephen King take over continues with New Line Cinema’s IT next week, the iconic horror author has quietly taken action to take back the rights to several of his high profile works.
One of the biggest stories of the year hit a few weeks back over at Zerner Law, who discovered that King recently filed notices that he intends to terminate the transfer of his licenses for the movies, The Dead Zone, Cujo, Creepshow, Children of the Corn, Cat’s Eye, and Firestarter.
The termination notices were mailed on August 31, 2016, and will be effective as of September 1, 2018. One year from this coming Friday King will be celebrating, probably with fava beans and a nice chianti.
In layman’s terms, King will have regained full rights to his stories The Dead Zone, Cujo, Creepshow, Children of the Corn, Cat’s Eye, and Firestarter next September. While the current rights holders will still be able to distribute their previously produced works, they will no longer be allowed to make new works, including sequels or remakes of the aforementioned titles:
“In other words, after September 1, 2018, if a studio wanted to make a sequel or remake of any of these movies, they would have to go back to Stephen King and make a new deal, explains the site.”
Here’s the complicated part: the termination only affects U.S. rights. If a studio wanted to make a sequel to Dead Zone, for example, but only wanted to release it outside the U.S., it could, in theory, do that.
This sounds incredibly similar to what’s been going on with the Friday the 13th rights, which means there have got to be hundreds of terminations coming in the wake of this law. The consequences could be catastrophic to studios but it could lead to some fresh and exciting deals, especially when the rights are taken away from a studio who has done nothing but abuse them.
Speaking of, the timing of this story is hilarious as earlier this week we told you that Children of the Corn Producer Donald Borchers filed a federal copyright suit, alleging that he and not The Weinstein Company owns the sequel rights to the franchise. While I’m no legal expert, it looks like he’s wasting his time with this one…
In regards to the other works, here are some that have been in the pipeline that better start filming within the next 354 days.
Akiva Goldsman is set to remake King‘s Firestarter for Universal Pictures. Goldsman will be co-writing the screenplay with Scott Teems (Rectify). Released in 1984, Mark L. Lester directed the first adaptation about a couple who participated in a potent medical experiment who gain telekinetic ability and then have a child, played by Drew Barrymore, who is pyrokinetic. A miniseries follow-up to the film, entitled “Rekindled”, was released in 2002 on the Sci-Fi Channel.
Sunn Classic Pictures, veteran producer/director Mr. Lang Elliott, in 2015 announced plans to produce, distribute and reboot films from its library. One of the most popular properties in the library is the film based on the Stephen King book entitled “Cujo” that starred Dee Wallace Stone in Sunn’s 1983 motion picture version. The reboot is currently titled C.U.J.O., and stands for “Canine Unit Joint Operations”. The screenplay has been completed and development is underway with Lang Elliott set to direct. DJ Perry was set to star. Lewis Teague directed the 1983 adaptation in which a friendly St. Bernard named “Cujo” contracts rabies and conducts a reign of terror on a small American town. It sounds as if the remake will integrate military into the story?
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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