The unfilmable adaptation Stephen King has been trying to make since 1982: “Several times he came very close”
One of these days, Hollywood is going to run out of Stephen King stories to adapt, but since the industry has doubled back on itself and started remaking and rebooting them, it won’t be happening for a while.
Not every one of the prolific author’s novels, novellas, or short stories that work on the page will do the same on the screen, but that hasn’t stopped filmmakers and producers from trying anyway, with The Dark Tower the most disastrous example of what happens when you try to film the unfilmable.
Then again, that’s already getting a reboot, with Mike Flanagan and episodic storytelling a much better fit than Nikolaj Arcel and whatever the fuck he was doing. In reality, there’s no such thing as an unfilmable novel if somebody is willing to try hard enough, but one of King’s books still hasn’t found that person, having recently celebrated its 40th anniversary in development hell.
Gerald’s Game was branded unfilmable by many, including King, but that man Flanagan managed to get it done. However, when no less a talent than Steven Spielberg kept paddling up shit creek in trying to bring it into live-action, maybe King’s sprawling fantasy epic, The Talisman, really is unfilmable after all.
Even though the book wasn’t published until 1984, the rights had been purchased two years before it hit shelves. “Universal bought the book for me, so it wasn’t optioned,” Spielberg explained. “I’ve owned the book since ’82, and I’m hoping to get this movie made in the next couple of years.” He said that in 2017, by which point he’d had The Talisman for 36 years and accomplished the square root of fuck all.
“Several times he came very close to making it,” King confirmed. “And there were a lot of discussions about that.” Evidently, those discussions didn’t get very far, with the coming-of-age story of a 12-year-old boy alternating between the real world and a parallel universe to locate the titular artifact and save his dying mother proving too tough of a nut to crack for one of cinema’s greatest-ever directors.
Spielberg called The Talisman “something that I’ve wanted to see come to theatres for the last 35 years,” and it still hasn’t. A six-hour miniseries was in the works with an eye to a 2008 premiere, but much like the intended feature-length adaptation, the project stalled and was sent straight back to filmic purgatory.
In 2022, the Jaws mastermind teamed up with Stranger Things creators The Duffer Brothers and Netflix to give it another shot, but by the end of 2025, the Duffers confirmed that their version was dead, too, with Matt resigning himself to the fact that “it was probably naïve of us to think we could break The Talisman.”
The Duffers “were not the ones to break the curse,” as they put it, and neither was Spielberg, and with the story no closer to making it to film or television since it was first optioned in 1982, there’s a distinct possibility that it’ll never do what dozens of other King’s tales have done and join the endless merry-go-round of adaptations.
