Stories From Stephen King's IF IT BLEEDS Being Adapted by Ben Stiller, John Lee Hancock, Jason Blum, and Darren Aronofsky
Stephen King’s novella collection If It Bleeds has landed three option deals, with a fourth one in the works. For those of you who don’t know, King options his stories for only a dollar, but he gets also gets a cut of the profits when the projects get made.
Netflix has picked up one of the stories titled Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, and it is being developed by Blumouse’s Jason Blum and Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story), and John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, The Highwaymen) will write and direct it.
Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is said to be the tale closest in tone to Stand By Me, with a supernatural spark thrown in for good measure. A youngster in Maine befriends and does odd jobs for the retired Mr. Harrigan, starting from when he is nine years old. Harrigan has a penchant for giving the youth scratch off lotto tickets that pay off and the youth reciprocates by buying the older man his first smart phone. When Mr. Harrigan dies, the teen puts the phone in his pal’s pocket before burial and when the lonely youth leaves his dead friend a message, he is shocked to get a return text from beyond the grave.
Ben Stiller has optioned the story Rat, which he will produce, direct, and star in.
Rat focuses on a frustrated writer named Drew Larson. With an acclaimed short story to his credit who turns to academia because each time he’s got a good book idea, something terrible happens. He is determined to write an idea for a Western, and heads out to an old family cabin in the woods determined to get it done. Severe storms occur and he makes a Faustian bargain with a rat to alleviate his writer’s block. Larson believes it was done in a dream state of delirium, but finds when he returns home that he made a rat pact to trade success for the life of a loved one…
Darren Aronofsky picked up the rights to The Life Of Chuck, and as of right now, he’s just aboard as a producer.
The Life Of Chuck concerns title character Charles Krantz, who dies at age 39 of a brain tumor and whose life is segmented into several eerie supernatural chapter breaks.
Then there’s the fourth installment, Let It Bleed, which might have found a deal of its own. The story revolves around a character named Holly, the clairvoyant detective who was also in King’s The Outsider. With HBO Max already having the rights to The Outsider, the reports says not to “be surprised if the If It Bleed bleeds into the future of the series.”
If It Bleeds focuses on Holly Gibney of the Finders Keepers detective agency who is trying to find a missing dog when she watches a news report of a school bombing, and becomes convinced that the reporter on that story might not be objective at all. Aside from The Outsider, Gibney also was part of King’s Bill Hodges trilogy, the Brendan Gleeson series that encompassed Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers and End of Watch.
I still haven’t had a chance to read King’s If It Bleeds book yet, but I’ve heard it’s great, and it looks like we’ve got some more fantastic King projects to look forward to seeing!
Source: Deadline
