Stephen King’s GERALD'S GAME Film Adaptation Moving Forward at Netflix
It's been a couple years since we learned that Steven King's Gerald's Game was being adapted into a film. After all this time with no updates or news, I thought the project was dead.
Back in 2014, Oculus director Mike Flanagan was hired to helm the project. He most recently directed a psychological horror film called Hush, and apparently it's been quite popular on the streaming service Netflix, which helped spark up new interest in finally getting Gerald's Game into development. In a recent interview with Rue Morgue the director said:
“All of Netflix’s numbers are proprietary, so I don’t get to look at them, but the way I’ve heard people talking, it’s been viewed an amazing number of times, and the reception has been very, very positive. Coincidentally, Stephen King watched Hush at home on Netflix and tweeted about it, which kind of blew my mind. And that got us talking about Gerald’s Game again.”
Flanagan has had a hard time finding a studio and financiers to back the film based on a story that mostly focuses on a woman chained to a bed through the majority of the story. The director explained:
“It’s a real challenge for financiers and distributors, who say, ‘Yeah, we love your work, we love Stephen King, but this story, this particular story? We don’t know how it works,’ without reshaping it to fit a much more conventional structure, which I did not want to do.”
He then revealed that's when Netflix stepped in to produce it. Not only that, but they are giving the director the freedom to make the film the way he wants to.
“And Netflix, because of how well Hush has done, said, ‘We’re really interested in this, and we’d like to do it the way you want to do it.’ And that eliminated the pressure of having to test-screen the movie and define the demographic that’s going to watch it—all of that stuff that typically comes into the conversation when you’re trying to figure out how to market a film for a wide theatrical release. It just cleared the table, so that I can make the movie I want to make.”
So if you're a fan of this book, it sounds like you're going to get a solid adaptation. If you're not familiar with the book, the story follows a woman who accidentally kills her husband during a game of bondage-type seduction. This happens in a remote retreat, and she soon realizes that she is trapped with little hope of rescue, at which point she begins to let the voices inside her head take over. Then the real nightmares begin.
I imagine Flanagan will start production on the film in the near future. I'm happy to hear it's happening, though, this is a great and intense story!