The Dark Tower has gotten the stamp of approval from King, and the movie has cheeky blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em references to other King works like The Shining, 1408, and The Shawshank Redemption. But we have plenty of complaints with Matthew McConaughey, who plays the Man in Black as if he’s still doing his goddamn suave-mumbling-mystic routine from his terrible Lincoln ads. We have no complaint with Idris Elba as the badass, square-jawed Gunslinger, who takes awkward teen Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) under his wing, quickly realizing he has the power to destroy the Dark Tower and, consequently, the universe. Actually, that’s what’s most disappointing about the finished film: At least if it had been outright terrible, it might have been more memorable. (For the purposes of this list, we looked at theatrical releases only, and excluded Lawnmower Man, an “adaptation” so vastly different from the original that King sued to get his name off it.) With one notable exception, you’ll find the adapted movies turned out much like King himself: They got more serious and substantial with age.Īfter years of false starts and, more recently, months of bad buzz, the long-anticipated adaptation of King’s beloved Dark Tower series proves to be kinda dull, in the most inoffensive way imaginable. Nonetheless, with the latest King adaptation, a remake of Firestarter, now in theaters, we gave it the old college try. As his canvas (and reputation) has expanded over the years, his work has been turned into dramas, comedies, musicals, and even a Bollywood movie.īecause of this dissonance, ranking King movies is particularly difficult: The Mangler and The Shawshank Redemption barely seem to exist on the same plane of dimensional existence, let alone on the same list of movies. Sure, a lot of them are horror (certainly a lot of the worst are horror), but that’s largely because the boom period for King movies was the 1980s, when he was known solely as a horror writer. Stephen King’s work has been adapted so many times - sometimes by King himself - that it’s impossible to find a single unifying thread in all of the film adaptations.

This story originally ran in 2017 and has been updated to reflect recent releases.

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