Stephen King Movies in 2025: Adaptation Breakdown

Transcript:

Welcome to The Cinema Psychos Show, the madhouse for film freaks and film fans of all types. I’m your host, Brian Cottington, German fellow co-host and filmmaker, John Wooliscroft. And that’s when they realize in order to get out of the sewer, they all had to take a term, raw dog and Bev. Jesus fucking Christ. I didn’t write it. I know. And you just, you know what, you’re waiting like literally five seconds into the episode. This is why YouTube will not recommend any of our shit, because you have to lead into the episode and just go right into raw dog and people. Brian, if you replace me, this show would be as big as Joe Rogan. I am not, no, I’m not gonna replace you. You’re too fun. But like it is a thing where it’s not John’s fault, it’s Stephen King’s fault. Why does he have to write this shit? But yes, this episode we are talking about Stephen King movies, more specifically about a resurgence almost this year. There’s been a pattern this year. With Stephen King adaptations. And if all of you want to hear our favorite Stephen King adaptations, you can check our back catalog. That’s actually going back a handful of years. That’s going back a bit. But yeah, this year, I always look for patterns in Hollywood. And this year we’ve had three adaptations already of Stephen King works, one coming out before the end of the year, one that came out right at the end of last year. And there are some things that are coming to streaming. And it’s just, you would have thought Stephen King died on just how much like his work is being adapted all of a sudden. Well, I mean, that kind of leads to my first question, John. Like, what is it about Stephen King stories that lead to the sort of resurgence that we’re seeing here? Is it just that, you know, they have kind of almost an ephemeral kind of feel to them, that they kind of, you know, address kind of the, you know, everyday scenarios that we all live with? Like, what is it about these stories that end up turning into these remakes, not remakes, but just, you know, reimagines that we’re seeing now? You know, it’s strange, because, you know, he was, and I guess you could kind of say still is, I mean, he’s been replaced by, in different subsections, like for the female audience, you know, he might be like Stephanie Meyer, or if you like the core stuff, it might be John Grisham, but he really has been for years and years like the rock star of the novel, you know. Except for Clive Barker, he said that he’s the future of horror. Yeah. Literally Stephen King said that. But it’s strange that he’s adapted so much when his books are so long and have so much adult material that, you know, you used to have like the movies that his short stories always did better, like Shawshank and everything, because they’re not 800 pages. And we used to have those movie of the weeks, you know. Oh, yes. Where but even Rose Red. Yeah. It Tommy Knockers, Tommy Knockers fill in the blank. But it’s like even those didn’t have enough time to really fully adapt Stephen King. But I think people who don’t want to read an 800 page book are like, well, I’ll wait for the movie of the week or movies. But but so many people do it wrong. I think now in the world of streaming, you know, still people want the movies to go to the theater. But I think something like it should really be an eight hour, nine hour episodic streaming thing. But we don’t get that. But yeah, everybody wants an adaptation of Stephen King work. And this this year we’ve had so many of them, but they’re not what you think. It’s not a cemetery. It’s not shining. It’s not, you know, not the A listers. Right. It’s kind of like the B and C listers, which is what really should be adapted. Yeah. But just to kind of give an idea here is at the end of last year, when I know 2024 doesn’t count, but in October we had a reimagining, I guess for lack of a better word, of Salem’s Lot. I actually liked it. Like that’s the thing. I actually did see Salem’s Lot that reimagined. And that was one that it was, it’s a film that honestly like it sat on the shelf for a while. Like that movie was filmed, I think in 2019 or 2020, and then hadn’t been released up until last year. Okay. And then it went to streaming, like it went directly to HBO Max. And you know, I didn’t hate it. I didn’t hate it at all. I’ve always been a fan of Salem’s Lot. I love the original from the 70s. I even liked the Rob Lowe one from like the early 2000s. Oh, God. Remember that one? Yeah. This one was a neat, neat kind of film. You know, it was a neat kind of reimagined. I enjoyed the book. It was before vampires were kind of played out. Yes. But yeah. But just to kind of give a sense of it, I know that’s 2024, but like the cat, but we’re bleeding into 2025. And the three ones that we’re going to mainly focus on and we’re kind of hint on the last one because it hasn’t come out yet is the monkey is in February 21st. Someone came out Life of Chuck June 13th, The Long Walk, September 12th and November 7th, we’re going to have Edgar Wright’s Running Man. Yes. So I mean, I’ll I’ll talk about the movie preview. I wish that we could have gotten an early cut of it, but hey, Edgar Wright, what’s up? Hey, Allied Marketing Global, can you give us like a cut, an early cut of those films? Like we would love that. We would love that. But just four adaptations on the big screen in one year. And on streaming, there’s The Institute and Welcome to Derry, which is like the It spin-off. I am so looking forward to Welcome to Derry. I’ve always felt that the most interesting character in It is Derry. Yes. And it’s ignored in the film. So I guess like that extra layer of going deeper is fine for a novel that’s almost a thousand pages. But you kind of have to leave a lot of them in the cutting room floor if you’re making a movie. Well, I mean, it’s also a thing, John, like we’ve seen this now with a lot of films where they, you know, they’ll have the film come out like The Batman, right? And then they, you know, will do the series like The Penguin that just dives a little bit more into, you know, the character of the city or, in this case, the Penguin, right, in Oswald Cobblepot’s, Cobbs, excuse me, not Cobblepot. I’m thinking of Batman Returns. But Oswald Cobbs’ like backstory and how his rise to like criminal underworld. So, like, I see similar things with Welcome to Derry is that you’ve got it part one and part two. We’re familiar with the character, opinion wise, we know that world. And this now kind of gives us kind of, you know, the town of Derry. It’s time, right? That there’s more to it. I imagine it’s going to be kind of Twin Peaks-esque. Oh, yeah. You know? Yeah. But with no subtlety. Where are the Twin Peaks like, what lies beneath? Like, we know what lies beneath. We know what lies beneath. And it floats. But, you know, the first movie of the year was The Monkey, which I think, first off, it was a short story by Stephen. So that’s a good place to start. Let’s start with the short story. But for those that are in the know, Osgood Perkins directed this, who you may know from Long Legs, but you may also know as the son of Anthony Perkins from Psycho fame. That’s crazy. And, yeah, he followed in his father’s footsteps in the directing end because people don’t know Anthony Perkins did go into directing later in his life. And this movie is just balls to the wall insane. It’s imagine the monkey’s paw, but instead it’s a full form chime, one of those chime monkeys that you can make wishes for. But every time you do, it ends in disaster, as any wish movie does. That’s not Aladdin. Those are the. Yeah. I mean, even Aladdin kind of ends in disaster, too, right? I mean, kind of before, you know, the Jafar becomes a genie. And then it’s like, OK, well, what’s going to happen now? He’s got all this power. But he’s like, no, no, it’s genie magic. But no, I love movies where there is kind of that cross section of mystical elements with some element of reality, right? Like we, as people, always have this idea that, hey, I wish I could do this or I wish I had more money or I wish I had this opportunity. And then it becomes a thing where it’s like, if you have that element that is grants you that thing, what does it take away from you? Right? And this one is very over the top of what it takes away from you. It’s the kind of thing that the horror is so dark, it’s funny. Yeah. And that’s not for everybody. But I think, I guess, spoiler alerts of people haven’t seen it. But it’s not anything to do with the plot. But somebody ends up dying by being on fire, running out of a house and impaling themselves on a for sale sign, like, through the mouth. And then later in the movie, when the police are there and the news crews are there, they just simply put a road cone over the blood and core of the for sale sign. And I’m like, okay, yeah, we’re not supposed to take this too seriously. I mean, that’s, that’s, I think, the best, you know, that’s the best type of of of gag right there is when you can see a horrible situation and try to find some way of making it funny. Right? So yeah, I think Osgood’s use of Dark Humor is what really sells it because it’s kind of a preposterous thing to begin with. Like the only way you’re going to get away with this is to go over the top. But it’s, yeah, it’s a super fun ride if you’re into the morbid and dark humor macabre and it does have, you know, a good message about, you know, what it means to kind of sell your soul. And it was a product of like a broken household where they found this way after the fact. It was something their dad who like had bought this years before, so they accidentally stumbled upon it and realized its power and tried to get rid of it. But, you know, it keeps coming back as they get older. Like you can’t get rid of this guy. Like they try to throw it down a well and it keeps coming back. So it’s almost like generational trauma. Yeah, basically. It’s generational trauma. It’s like, yeah, your parents’ sins kind of stick with you. Yeah, yeah. So but yeah, it’s it’s very interesting with these three films because they’re they’re very different. You know, The Monkey is very sardonic and darkly funny. Life of Chuck is very kind of life affirming. And The Long Walk is just kind of like. A dark look at what he wrote at the time was about Vietnam, but it hits as much today as it does, which is kind of terrifying. But, yeah, you know, the The Monkey was kind of overla. All of these. Well, the first two were very overlooked, but The Long Walk, I think, has resonated with people. I really would suggest people check out Life of Chuck because this is not horror. This is very much Stephen King at his thoughtful level. So it’s like Shawshank, Stephen King. Yeah, it’s. But the thing is, it starts off like it’s great because it’s not narrative. It breaks it into three different stories. And the first story, if you don’t know what you’re going into, which I hadn’t read the short story, but it’s just the world is falling apart around people. And like the teacher is in the classroom and everybody’s talking about like, oh, you know, these these lands are falling into the ocean. There’s no Internet left. There’s no reason to be living any longer. And they’re trying to go through the student evaluations when like, clearly the end of the world is here. But everywhere everybody goes, it says like, you know, thank you for 45 years of service, Chuck, you know, and there’s billboards everywhere. He’s on benches and everybody’s like, who is this Chuck? And why is he the only one that seems to be happy as the world is collapsing? And, you know, the world continues to fall apart. And it gets to the end of the first chapter, where the stars seem like they’re imploding and everything just kind of turns to black. And it’s like, what was that? You know, you know, and then we get introduced to Chuck and the whole thing of him. You’re hearing dance music on the street and he is just in like just completely infected by this music and just cuts a rug like you wouldn’t believe. And it’s Loki. What’s his name? Oh, yes. Tom Hiddleston. Tom Hiddleston. And yeah, clearly knows how to dance. But you know, and it’s kind of like, wait, isn’t that the guy who was on all the billboards inside people’s windows and on TV from the last one? And he’s just dancing and celebrating. And we’re told that he only has so many months left to live. What he doesn’t know is he’s got a brain tumor. Yeah. But and from there, it goes from that particular story to finding out what he was like as a child. OK. And in his childhood, he loses his parents. He’s living with his grandparents, which Mark Hamill is in both Life of Chuck and Long Walk. So apparently, Mark Hamill just goes, Oh, Stephen King adaptation. I’m in. Yeah. But, you know, he’s growing up and dealing with this trauma. And his grandmother, who is Sloan from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That’s funny. Yeah. She took a lot of years off from acting, but she’s back in this one. She teaches him as a kid, like how to dance. And it kind of like brings him out of his shell. And this is the longest we spend with any one particular story. Right. And we kind of learn that there’s a third floor to this house that Mark Hamill, as his grandpa says, like, you cannot go up there. Okay. Not in any way, shape or form can you ever go up there. And that’s kind of left as a mystery through the whole thing. And as we go along, we start to find out that there is one teacher that, you know, our young Chuck is connecting with. Like, she’s one of those teachers that wants to change the world, but the students don’t give a crap. Yes, there’s always one. And she’s teaching him about Walt Whitman. And for those that don’t know that Walt Whitman, you know, has famously had the line, there are multitudes of me. And you start to realize, okay, what they’re saying is that as we’re dying, because then we kind of get hinted in that it’s he’s on his deathbed, that the first part where everybody that he’s had experiences with are living in his head. You know, people he’s known. So those are his multitudes. And they’re realizing that they themselves are memories of themselves that are now going to die as his brain dies. Oh, okay. So yeah, it’s an exploration told in different ways about his life. And at the very end, he goes up to that room as a child after his grandfather’s died, Mark Hamill dies, and he sees an image of himself dying as Tom Hiddleston. And so like that room will show you your future, and he decides to deal with that and say, I’m going to live my life to the fullest, which he doesn’t do until that second part when he dances and starts to feel alive again. So it’s a beautiful exploration of life that wouldn’t work if it was told chronologically. No. But it’s just that structure really resonated with me. And this film, not that I didn’t love The Monkey as well, but this film and The Long Walk, which we’ll talk about, is absolutely two of my top 10 films of the year. Wow. Yeah. That Life of Chuck just really hit me because it could have been sappy. It could have been a little too much, but it really draws that line between being too saccharine and being sincere at the same time. The Long Walk is completely different, which for those that don’t know the premise, it’s a world where it’s a post-apocalyptic world where nobody has anything worth a shit. It’s like you’re lucky if you have moldy bread to eat and tainted water, and every boy basically in the country signs up for The Long Walk, where I think there’s 20 some odd young men that they walk as long as they can, and whoever is the last one standing wins a fortune and one prize of their choosing. The fortune isn’t the prize? No, they get one other thing too. Sorry. So we see over time, one kid, he breaks his ankle, and the idea is if you fall, you get three warnings to get back up, and if you don’t get about a third warning, you just get shot in the head. Jesus fucking Christ. So everybody dies except the winner, and we follow these… Is that the prize? Not dying? Not dying in the fortune? I mean, again, you’re telling me there’s more prizes. And so Stephen King, imagine this, was one of his first stories he ever wrote during the Vietnam era. Imagine that. Yeah. I mean, you could see a lot of parallels there, right? Young men signing up for something, and the prize being like, I don’t know, going to college. But you’ve got, there’s the odds of you getting shot or more apt. And the whole suggestion is that, you know, we volunteer, but nobody really volunteers. We don’t have a choice. No. I mean, if you look at that through the lens of, like, you know, modern day military recruitment, it is called, you know, an economic and capitalist system that literally is churning out dead soldiers. Through keeping opportunity away from certain people. Sometimes it might be based on race. Sometimes it just might be based on economic status. But that is, in essence, designed to create dead soldiers. As George Carlin once said, people that are anti-abortionists, they want live babies to raise dead soldiers. Yes. But this movie does a great job of following, I would say, six to seven central characters without losing anybody in the process. All fairly different character types. But there are so many unique ways that people end up dying off in this. There is one scene where somebody ends up having the shits. Oh, Jesus Christ. And he keeps dropping his pants. And it’s obviously digital, but just runny shit. Just runny shit. Of course, it couldn’t be a solid turn. It had to be diarrhea level. Well, what I thought was so funny is the theater I was in. I just turned and looked at the crowd. And there was one guy who was going, oh, oh. He was second from you. He was vomiting. Yeah, that was the thing. Not the gunshots to the head. It was the shit. But just watching the runny diarrhea. Yeah. And he ends up not being able to continue on. And that’s what takes him out. But yeah, it’s Harry took him out. And you would think a bunch of people just walking and getting to know these characters would get boring fast. But it really doesn’t, you know, because we do get a lot of cutaways. And where this is where I think this movie resonates a lot today is our main character, who is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son. OK, that he’s doing this because he wants his one wish to be a spoiler alerts, I guess, folks, his one wish is to kill Mark Hamill, who is the drill sergeant. And this is like he’s basically on a truck going, come on, boys. He sounds like Joker when he’s doing it. Of course he does. Yeah, because he’s trying to have that voice like, yeah, come on, go fast, come on, Batman. But yeah, his wish will be to get in a room alone with the general afterwards to kill him because years ago we see a flashback where his father was giving him illegal books to read and illegal music to listen to. And like the Gestapo, they show up to his house, pull him out and say, if you renounce this and give allegiance and allow us to burn all this stuff, we’ll let you live what basically with like a scarlet letter, so to speak. And he says, no, I refuse. And they gun them down in the streets. And I’m like, where does that kind of sound familiar? Yeah, banning books, guys in masks pulling people out of cars and home depots. I can’t imagine what that sounds like. So a book written in the 1970s, I guess we haven’t learned anything. No, we haven’t learned shit. We have not learned shit. So this is where we are. This was, as of right now, I will say, we do our end of the year thing in January. We talk about our favorite films. Right now, and this is card subject to change because this is only early October. This is my favorite movie of the year. Wow. That’s a bold statement there. It’s powerful. It’s well directed, well edited, well acted. And it resonates today as much as it did when Stephen King was writing it about Vietnam back in the day. And again, this is another one of his shorter stories. I think this is, if you’re going to do theatrical adaptations, this is where they should really lean on. It’s the short stories. Absolutely. Yeah, where I know they don’t want to do this, but the longer ones like Under the Dome and It, those should be streaming. Well, I mean, it’s a thing, John, that like those longer ones have nuance to them. They have different aspects of them that it’s a thing where audiences who are maybe fans of those books, they’ve read them back cover to cover, right? They’re expecting that nuance in there, and you just can’t fit all of that in a two and a half hour film. Or you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot. Well, even It, that’s two, three hour films. But still, there’s- I’ve read It, and it doesn’t- six hours doesn’t begin to cover. I mean, that is one of the things, is like, when you adapt a book to a film, there are things that have to be cut away just for logistics sake. And the thing is, is that sometimes can affect the fan service that you’re delivering, right? Like, that’s just nature of the beast. But yes, when you do have a streaming series, it makes more sense because you can jump off from points in that, right? Like, maybe you cover only the book to start with for season one, but then once you get through season one, they’re like, oh, you got Green Lift for season two. It’s like, oh, great. We can now expand the lore. Yeah. We can go beyond it and make it its own thing. And that’s where you do get some series that really transcend that. Like, first thing that comes to mind is Dexter, right? Like, imagine if that was a movie. Yeah. All, like, 12 novels and just one movie. But, like, they clearly started out with the novel as the blueprint. And then as it became more and more popular, they branched it out and started to create it its own. So that now when you look at the novels and then you look at the series, it’s two completely different entities. But they’re all about the same characters that we’ve grown to love and care about. And I will say with these films, why I am a Stephen King fan, although like, God, I think he is so hit and miss, it’s ridiculous, is that the three trailers I saw, I’m like, okay, The Monkey looks like horror, cheese, dark humor fun. I almost thought it was like an 80s film. Yeah, it had that. Like Monkey Shines. It gave me Monkey Shines vibes. Nice Romero reference. Damn right. Life of Chuck seemed like, I’m like, oh, what is this premise? Because it really only kind of hits on the first chapter of it in the trailer. And then The Long Walk, I’m like, wow, that seems kind of like, that could be interesting. It almost seemed like what Running Man actually was. The only thing with that one was like, I saw the gag, I think it was on social media, of like people in the theater on treadmills. Yeah. Walking while watching the film. It’s a good marketing campaign. Fantastic marketing campaign. But so yeah, it wasn’t there with Stephen King. I just thought they were three very interesting ones. And then I thought to myself, wait, there’s three Stephen King artificially. Oh wait, no, there’s four. Because what hasn’t come out yet is, I don’t know if it’s going to be completely accurate to the book, but it’s going to be a hell of a lot more accurate than Arnold’s Running Man. I don’t give a shit, John. Oh, I love Running Man. Love the Arnold One. Check our back catalog. We did that episode. No, I fucking love The Running Man. I’ve never read the novel. That is the truth of it. It’s a short story. A short story. Yeah. So I’ve never read the short story, but I love the Arnold One. It’s going to be hard for me to look at it through the lens of not going like, you should have Arnold here, right? Like, you know, all of the isms that he has in there, and then, you know, the cadre, cola, and what’s his face? Who’s the game show host for it? Oh, from Family Feud. Yeah, from Family Feud. So, like, all of those things that I love about that, I worry that that preconceived notion is going to infect the viewing experience of people who go in to watch it. What I like from what I’m seeing from the trailer and having read the source is that it’s not going to be just a rehash of the Arnold one. Like, if you’re going to adapt something again, like make it closer to the source material, it’s something you’ve ventured far. Like, I didn’t see it because I didn’t care about the total recall remake. Oh, man. From what I understood, it’s closer to the actual short story. Yeah, it’s still bad though. Oh, yeah. But you didn’t see it? No, I kind of refused to. I saw it. It was- My morbid curiosity made me see the Robocop remake. That one was bad. Yeah. That one’s like, let’s go ahead and have Michael Keaton, Batman, be a bad guy. Although, he is a good bad guy. He can play a good bad guy. But he just comes off as an evil Steve Jobs. Yeah. But that Total Recall remake- Wait, isn’t Steve Jobs an evil Steve Jobs? Rest in peace. Rest in peace kind of evil. But that Robocop, not Robocop, but the Total Recall remake, man, fucking terrible. The whole idea of we’ve got an elevator that goes through the earth and one side is poor people and the other side is rich people. I’m like, okay, dude. Okay, dude. I’m like, where are the mutants at? Oh, there’s no mutants. There’s no Mars. Okay, there’s no fucking Mars. So it’s like all the good things that I loved about Robocop. You just stripped all of it out. And it’s like, oh, well, it’s more accurate to the book. It’s like, I don’t give a fucking shit. I don’t care. Are you in Total Recall? Oh, Total Recall. I want the weird shit. I want my Paul Verhoeven mutants and weird things. And three titty ladies. Like, why did you get rid of that stuff? Not enough Kate Beckinsales can fill that void. Yeah, right. I mean, it comes. I’ll fill her void. But this is why we don’t have as many women listeners as anybody. But I will say from obviously all I can base my thoughts on is the trailer. And Edgar Wright is directing this. And by God, does it look like it’s an Edgar Wright movie? I mean, that’s the thing is, I trust Edgar Wright’s handling of any material, regardless of what it is. I mean, I’ve seen his films and been like, I don’t really like it, but it’s stylistic and beautiful. Right? Like that, like what’s the one that had Anya Taylor Joy in it? Oh, Last Night at… Last Night in Soho. Soho, yeah. Yeah. Like that one, it was all right. It was like, it’s okay. But like it visually in through post-production, it’s absolutely beautiful film. But, you know, just not really my vibe. But I’ve seen a lot of all those films that I’m like stylistically amazing. So I do think it’s interesting this is coming out the same year as Long Walk, because it’s dystopian futures about somebody either walking or running from imminent death. But, yeah, I get maybe they’re completely different studios. They didn’t care. They just wanted to to drop them. So, yeah, I don’t know. What do you think? Do you think it’s just a huge coincidence that we have four Stephen King adaptations this year, one right at the end of last year, and two streaming adaptations of his work? You want the cynical version of me? Yeah. Okay. So the cynical version of me is looking at this of it is probably far cheaper to adapt Stephen King and also probably far more lucrative to adapt Stephen King just because the man has a fan base. Yes. So it’s a thing where you can always attach Stephen King to marketing materials and to the fact that like his fans probably are aware of those stories already so you’ve already got a through line to them. So it’s less energy on their part to market it. You know, I also just think that, you know, his stories for the most part are universally loved. You know, even some of these obscure ones, they’re universally loved. So you know that any of the adaptation coming from it is going to play well. You know, like, can you think of a Stephen King adaptation that’s not been good? And when I mean good, I mean like just barely passable. I’m not talking terrible. I’m just saying like, you know, you know, you’re, oh, yeah, it’s a movie. It’s okay. You know, I can’t think of one that’s terrible. And I think having his name attached to all these, because like I knew they were Stephen King adaptations, even though something like Life of Chuck, which I had never seen. But if I was explaining this movie to you, like if this is an idea I came up with, Brian, and I’m pitching it to you, this is a movie we should make you be like, is John been drinking? Because I would be like, it’s just it seems so all over the map and it’s so he is a bit bipolar in that. Like he clearly is like, yes, you know me as the horror guy, but fuck you, I’m going to go ahead and do some affirmational shit, shit too. Yeah, no, it’s now it’s the girl who loved Tom Gordon. It’s like, what, what, what are you doing? Like, like, is there, is there dead people in there? Like, is there some sort of creepy clown? No, no, it’s about life. Okay. So I think that that’s what would have drew people into the theater to see Life of Chuck. Because I think it did decent. It wasn’t, you know, a big blockbuster. I heard a lot of people who were, you know, singing its praises on social media and TikTok and all those places. It definitely found an audience. And I think it’s the same thing with, like, Shawshank Redemption. Like, on paper, if you were to describe the Shawshank Redemption, be like, this movie should not be good. Like, it just shouldn’t. But it ends up becoming good. And I think a lot of that also plays to, like, the actual production of the film. How is the film cast? How is the adaptation done? Right? You know, when you adapt a short story or anything, things are going to change. It’s like, how did you change it up to make it still relevant and make it still connect with the source of that story? And there’s, what’s interesting is that Life of Chuck, to use that one as an example, is part of a short story collection. Yeah. And I was killing time. I was going to go to a movie at the AMC Lowe’s in the waterfront. If you’re not from Pittsburgh, it’s like a big shopping area. Yep. Has a huge movie theater. Big multiplex. But we had, my fiancee, we had time to kill, so we went into the Barnes and Noble down there. And I can never remember which one’s open or which one’s closed. I always want to say Borders. And I was like, no, that’s the one that went to front. Borders is closed. And I went through an area and I saw, oh, they’re selling the short story of just Life of Chuck by itself now. So it’s like, oh, now we can get a resurgence and sell the short story by itself. Totally. But yeah, I just I would say like if it was like Jaws, when Jaws was successful, you got Orca, you got Piranha, you know, that build off it. But when all these are coming out months apart from different studios, this has to as Doc Brown would say, has to be an amazing coincidence. I mean, I I look at it from the standpoint of like. These people, these studios are just trying to get stuff out. You also have to consider this too. This was probably made during the Rider Strike, or like either preceding it or after it. So it’s like the you’re getting them coming out of that. If I did guess, I’d probably say it was probably written before the Rider Strike, like they needed to get it, you know, taken care of out the door. So it’s it’s not surprising to me that they’re all cascading at one time if they were rushing to get them written before Rider’s Round Strike, you know? I mean, there’s something you said like The Monkey, like that really speaks to Osgood Perkins’ nature. So he probably picked that one. The Long Walk might have been chosen because, oh, it has echoes of what we’re going through today. The only one that kind of stands out is Life of Chuck. And Running Man might just be because, well, people love the one in the 80s. People love The Running Man. And we got to try to make Glenn Powell happen, damn it. They are trying so hard. This is almost kind of like WWE when they try to make, like, Roman Reigns. Remember Roman Reigns? They try to make him a thing. I only know that because my kids were in Dome for a hot minute. They turned him heel when he finally did get over. OK. But it was a thing where it’s like they do this. They try to force it down your throat. You’re like, no, no, no, dude, this ain’t how this works. Yeah. But yeah, they’re going to try to try to make him a leading man. And I don’t think it’s going to work. So I just don’t. You know, I think also is kind of like a final thought on it. There you know, there’s only so many comic books you can remake, only so many things you can reimagine. But Stephen King, man, even off cocaine, the guy produces 100 pieces of work a year. So even off cocaine, it’s like go through his short story collections. They’re like, all right, let’s buy the rights to this one. Let’s buy the rights to this one. You know, it’s he’s a fountain of untapped, potential of adaptation. You know, it’s not like he’s George RR. Martin, who has only written like so many books and people wait forever for the next one. He’s like, hey, here’s 17 new books this year and eight short story books. So there’s just there’s a well to go. There is a massive well of Stephen King stuff that pull from. And when you’re too scared to give somebody an original shot, like, here’s your chance to be like, well, we can say it’s from Stephen King. Like, well, that’s what I’m saying is, is from a studio perspective, you know that Stephen King sells, you know that it is competently written, and then it just becomes a matter of like, okay, well, we just had to adapt it for our film and pull parts that we think are going to work well and pull parts and take parts that aren’t and put them on the side. So it’s, and it’s with a short story, as I said, like that’s easier to do than a novel. What is interesting though is I find it funny that the studios have learned through litigation, like the whole Lawn Mower Man stuff, that you got to be careful. You can’t just put Stephen’s name on it and change the whole thing. And that’s the thing is none of these movies have from the mind of Stephen King at the top of them, right? Right. They never, it might say adapted from it, like it gives him credit clearly, but they’re not using Stephen King’s name as a marketing thing. And check our back catalog on Lawn Mower Man, because we went into that deep in the lawsuit that Stephen King ultimately won against New Line, who was making The Lawn Mower Man and used his name as marketing material. Right. We’ve talked about Stephen King adaptations, and then we talked about Lawn Mower Man. Now we’re talking about the year of Kate. I think maybe we’ve exhausted the man. We have exhausted the man. But we even thought we could do another Stephen King month because there’s so many ones that we left on. You thought that. I’m like, what the fuck are you talking about? No way, man. I’m not doing another Stephen King month. But I would say this to people, if you have any insights, hit us up on Discord, hit us up in the comments. If you have any reason as to why there are four feature length, high production valued adaptations of Stephen King work in one year on top of streaming, please let us know how this happens. Is it just a huge coincidence or is it something else that maybe I’m missing that I didn’t do deep research enough? Something’s in the water, causing everyone to make these Stephen King adaptations. Yeah, so let us know, but I mean, I would say it’s three out of four so far. I would say the three that I saw, I absolutely love. I hope Running Man doesn’t let me down. And usually, it’s going to. If you have… I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s going to. If you have three Stephen King adaptations one year, you expect one to be terrible, one to be, and then one to be pretty good. Here’s the thing, I already am worried because doesn’t The Running Man come out in December? Around Thanksgiving. Okay, that’s hit or miss. Yeah. Thanksgiving is usually like prestige cinema time. Or like the first Christmas films of the year. That’s when the Santa Claus came out. So like when I hear that The Running Man is coming out around Thanksgiving time, I’m like, are you expecting this one to fail? Yeah. I just I got a bad feeling about it. I can tell from the trailer. They threw a bunch of money at it. So I mean, yeah, they’re going to have to throw money at it to, I guess, to make you worst case scenario, tax write off. They’re still going to put it out. The theaters is not a direct tax write off, but good talk. Good talk on Stephen King stuff. So John, where can they find you at on the Internet? The Facebookers, the Instagrammers, you can always hit me up on email if you still choose. I’m sure I still have a Myspace login. I don’t know what it is. A Myspace. But you can find me over at jdubbbzvideo nasties. Again, the Ghostbusters episode is out. I hope that I’m not shooting myself in the foot on that one, but if it’s not out by now, what the hell am I doing? I’m working currently on a little more thoughtful brain massaging one about a psychologist who wrote a book about what are the actual mental illnesses that go into line with famous horror movie characters. He breaks that down and gives real life scenarios about, for example, The Nightmare on Elm Street, the actual person that was scared to death in their dreams. He breaks that down and what disorder that is. So very kind of interesting talk I had with him. And then, yeah, be on the lookout for more spooky stuff. Skeleton Key check-in coming soon. So all kinds of good spooky stuff around the corner. And of course, if you have loved this episode, please do me a favor and share it. Share with your friends, share with your family, share it with your favorite Stephen King fan. And of course, if you want to follow the podcast, you can do so by going to cinemapsychoshow.com/follow. You can go there, click the little buttons and boom, you’re following us on your favorite podcast type of choice. And if you’re watching us here on YouTube, hey, thank you so much. Please do me a favor and like and share and subscribe and hit the little notification bell because that stuff really does do the algorithm justice for The Cinema Psychos Show and gets our stuff shown more. With that said, we will see you next time. Hey, remember in Gerald’s game when there’s a 50 page chapter about an uncle molesting his niece?