Stephen King names the most underrated adaptation of his work: “A terrific, eccentric movie”
The Stephen King adaptation has become a subgenre unto itself, with barely a year going by without at least one of the author’s literary works debuting on the big or small screens.
In fact, you’d have to go back to 2008 for the last time an entire 12 months passed without a movie, returning TV series, debuting show, or miniseries based on King’s back catalogue not premiering, and the average is well above one per year, with four arriving in 2025 alone.
As expected, those adaptations have covered the good, the bad, and the ugly, with every Shawshank Redemption or Green Mile being countered by a Graveyard Shift or a Dark Tower, with King himself complicit in butchering his own back catalogue with his ill-fated directorial debut, Maximum Overdrive.
It doesn’t really matter how they turn out, because his name alone is enough to convince virtually every major studio in Hollywood to give them a green light. Sells don’t come much easier, but since there have been so many of them, it’s to be expected that some underrated gems have fallen through the cracks.
Then again, that’s an entirely subjective term, and with those so-called gems being named by none other than Stephen King, accusations of bias aren’t without warrant. On the other hand, he did call one of them a “trainwreck” before seemingly changing his mind and suggesting that it needed a second look.
“There are ones that I frankly don’t understand why they’ve been reviewed so badly,” he told Yahoo when reflecting on past page-to-screen translations that were overlooked. “I guess I’ve got to go back and look at Dreamcatcher, which has just been kind of lashed. I’d like to take a look at that again.”
Some adaptations are beyond saving, and Dreamcatcher is one of them. However, King was utterly bemused at the apathetic response to a 2016 sci-fi horror. “I frankly never understood why people didn’t like Cell,” he said. “Because, to me, that was a terrific, eccentric movie with some really eccentric, strange performances in it.”
Based on his novel of the same name, Tod Williams helmed the film from a script co-written by Adam Alleca and… Stephen King, which might explain why he thinks it’s underrated. “John Cusack at his best, and Samuel L Jackson is terrific,” he maintained. “So I would say Cell, for sure.”
It was given an almost entirely straight-to-video release, was panned by critics, and isn’t very good at all, so King is standing on a wobbly leg when trying to state a compelling, or even remotely convincing, case that Cell is anything other than a dud.
