It’s no secret that Sam Raimi, director of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, has expressed a desire to adapt a Stephen King novel for the big screen. ( Sam also just endorsed Evil Dead Rise, giving it his seal of approval.)
Raimi said to CinemaBlend that he would love to direct a film based on Stephen King’s works. One of his favorite books to adapt was The Stand by Stephen King, which he noted when asked whether he had any specific ideas for a film adaptation. His words are as follows.
Oh, absolutely. I love The Shining, but someone already had that. And I loved Carrie, but that had already been made by the time I had read it. And then his Night Shift collection is so brilliant. So many of those stories would’ve made great movies. Rob Reiner made a great one that I wanted to make too. So there’s been plenty of great King stories that I wish I could get involved with. Maybe in the future, we can work together.
Raimi
Sam Raimi and Stephen King have worked together before. While attending the Cannes Film Festival in 1983, King saw The Evil Dead and declared it his sixth favourite horror film of all time in a Twilight Magazine review. New Line Cinema may have given the picture a nationwide distribution because of King’s public backing, according to some. Raimi starred in the miniseries adaptations of two of King’s most successful novels in the 1990s. While in The Shining, he had the role of a gas station attendant, and in The Stand, he was one of Randall Flagg’s thugs, Bobby Terry.
When Sam Raimi mentions a Rob Reiner adaptation, he’s most likely referring about Misery, not Stand By Me, and the idea of it happening is enough to make one’s head spin. As someone who considers Misery to be among the greatest thrillers ever made, the idea that Raimi would be able to adapt the story just a few years after the production of Evil Dead II is enough to make me want to travel across the multiverse and into a parallel reality where that film was made.
