DOCTOR SLEEP Director Mike Flanagan Still Mourns the Loss of Another Stephen King Film Project
After directing the film adaptation of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep, director Mike Flanagan was developing another film project from the Master of Horror, an adaptation of the book Revival.
I was very excited about that book being turned into a film, but unfortunately, after Doctor Sleep had a disappointing box office run, Warner Bros. was stupid enough to scrap Revival.
Revival is described as a dark story of addiction, fanaticism, and what might exist on the other side of life. It centers on Reverend Charles Jacobs, “a minister in Harlow, Maine, who shares a secret obsession with boy Jamie Morton, a draw so powerful, it has profound consequences five decades after the shattering tragedy that turned the preacher against God, and long after his final, scathing sermon.
“Jamie grows to become a nomadic rock guitarist hooked on heroin, and meets Charles Jacobs again, and their bond becomes a pact beyond the Devil’s devising.”
During a panel at Fan Expo Canada, via Screen Rant, and he talked about how he still mourns the loss of that production.
Flanagan said: “I wrote a script off of Revival that I love. Man, is it dark. We did the ending and, if you've read it, it is one of the bleakest most chilling endings that King's ever done - including Pet Sematary.
“It's dark, but man did I love that script. When people ask me what the phantom limb is, what the project that got away is, it'll always be Revival.”
When talking about why the studio pulled the plug on the project, the director said: “I had written it for Warner Brothers right after we had been shooting Doctor Sleep, but Doctor Sleep didn't work in the box office.
“I'm enormously proud of the movie, and I hear from fans that it seems to grow, but it didn't perform to the studio's expectations. And so a lot of the projects that we had at Warner Brothers died as a result, and Revival was one of them.”
He went on to say: “I've mourned for it ever since, but I do not have the rights to it. It went away. And Steve, very wisely, doesn't like to saddle the same filmmaker with more than one thing because it means that something's not proceeding.
“There are other Stephen King properties that I am attached to that took precedence over that, and the choice was to pursue those or to try to get Revival going someplace else.
“We let it go, but I'll always pine for that movie. Maybe it comes back around. You never know with these things.”
Maybe one day Revival will finally get a film adaptation, but I really want to see Flanagan’s version of the story and there’s a good chance that will never happen.