Upcoming Stephen King Movies & TV Shows You Need To Know About

Stephen King is quite the prolific author. In addition to countless short stories, the man tends to publish at least one book a year, churning out high-quality stories that terrify readers on a regular basis. That’s a wealth of tales for Hollywood to adapt, and they have indeed come knocking at King’s door many, many times. His stories are the basis for some absolute classic horror films, including “The Shining” and “Misery,” but he’s also the writer behind the iconic coming-of-age film “Stand By Me.”  In the past few years alone, we’ve gotten great films like “The Boogeyman,” “Gerald’s Game,” “1922,” and “Doctor Sleep.”

As a result, at any given time, there are tons of King adaptations currently in the works. Some are being planned as films, others as television shows; some of those shows are limited in scope, while others might go on for years. While a handful of adaptations are coming out very soon, others may still be just a pipe dream. It’s an exciting time to be one of King’s Constant Readers, and no matter which flavor of his storytelling you like best, chances are that somebody’s working on something that might be for you. 

With that in mind, here’s a roundup every upcoming Stephen King movie and TV show you need to know about.

Osgood Perkins just directed “Longlegs,” one of the scariest horror movies of 2024. There was a four-year gap between “Longlegs” and his previous film, “Gretel & Hansel” in 2020, but fans of the horror auteur won’t have to wait long for his next film. He’s directed an adaptation of “The Monkey,” a short story that was originally included in Stephen King’s “Skeleton Crew” anthology, and the film will be released on February 21, 2025.

Though “Longlegs” certainly had a wry sense of humor to it, it seems that “The Monkey” will be a more straightforward horror-comedy. After all, it’s about an evil toy monkey, and there’s only so many ways you can make that scary. Perkins told The Hollywood Reporter that he approached the film intending to make people laugh. “It’s feeling more like an old John Landis movie or a Joe Dante movie or a Robert Zemeckis movie,” he said. “I saw an opportunity to make a wry, absurdist comedy about death. It’s about the very basic fact that we all die — and how f***ing funny and weird and impossible and surreal is that s***?”

A teaser trailer for “The Monkey” has been released, hinting at the comedic tone Perkins is going for. The cast includes Theo James, Elijah Wood, Tatiana Maslany, and Perkins himself.

Mike Flanagan has directed several of the best Stephen King adaptations of all time, including “Doctor Sleep” and “Gerald’s Game,” so it’s no surprise that he has several others in the works. One, “The Life of Chuck,” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2024. Neon won the rights to the film and will release it on May 30, 2025.

The movie is based on a novella that was included in King’s 2020 collection “If It Bleeds.” The story was originally told in reverse chronological order, tracing out the life of an accountant from death to birth. The movie won the Audience Award at TIFF and received great reviews, currently sitting at 85% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. “I’m absolutely overwhelmed,” Flanagan said in a statement (via The Hollywood Reporter). “We’re so grateful that ‘The Life of Chuck’ connected with audiences in such a powerful way, but never expected this.”

In addition to Tom Hiddleston in the lead role, the cast includes Flanagan regular Karen Gillan, Chiwetel Ejiofor, David Dastmalchian, and Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill. Flanagan told an audience at ATX that the “Star Wars” star does some of his best work ever in the film. “I just did a movie this past fall that I’m very proud of, it has a real doozy of a monologue in it that Mark Hamill delivers. It’s my favorite piece of acting I’ve ever seen from Mark Hamill, it’s four and a half minutes,” Flanagan teased. “It’s just — yes!”

In 2017 and 2019, Stephen King adaptations “It” and “It: Chapter Two” made Warner Bros. a bunch of money, cementing Bill Skarsgard’s version of Pennywise as a horror icon. It makes sense, then, that Warner Discovery would want to milk the intellectual property for all it’s worth. From “It” and “It: Chapter Two” writer/director Andy Muschietti comes “It: Welcome to Derry,” a prequel series set decades before the events of the film.

In addition to new cast members like Jovan Adepo, Taylour Paige, and Madeleine Stowe, the nine-episode series brings back Skarsgard to reprise his role. On a podcast called “Happy Sad Confused,” the “Nosferatu” star revealed that he was initially hesitant about returning to the creepy clown. He’d just played Count Orlock and didn’t want to be trapped doing monster movies, but Muschietti convinced him that it was worthwhile. “It was fun. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, actually,” he confessed. “There are parts of it where we got to explore sides of ol’ Pennywise that we haven’t seen, and that’s fun … I think there’s some cool stuff in there that we haven’t seen that I’m excited for the people to watch and enjoy, hopefully.” 

There’s a brief glimpse at the show in a trailer for Max’s 2025 offerings, but no release date has yet been set.

“The Long Walk” was originally released as a book by Richard Bachman, one of Stephen King’s pseudonyms. Like “The Running Man,” another Bachman book that we’ll dig into below, “The Long Walk” imagines a futuristic competition that doesn’t seem all that far-fetched in our modern world. The book is about a world where teenage boys are made to compete by walking along a highway for hundreds of miles. If they slow down or stop to rest, they are killed. If they survive to the end of the walk, they’ll be set up handsomely for the rest of their lives.

A teenage competition to the death is fitting material for director Francis Lawrence, who was behind several of the “Hunger Games” films. He’s been in production on an adaptation of “The Long Walk” with a script by J.T. Mollner, the director of last year’s hyper-stylish thriller “Strange Darling.” Mollner teased their approach to the material in an interview with Cinema Blend, remarking, “[Lawrence] wanted to do it the right way, a faithful way. And he knew that meant it was gonna be a very hardcore, disturbing and somewhat controversial movie. And that’s the movie I was interested in writing.”

The cast of “The Long Walk” includes Judy Greer, Mark Hamill, “Alien: Romulus” star David Jonsson, Charlie Plummer, Cooper Hoffman, and “Jojo Rabbit” lead Roman Griffin Davis. A release date hasn’t been announced, but production took place in summer 2024, so we can probably expect the film in 2025.

“The Running Man” deals with a future where people compete on dangerous, televised game shows for a chance to win their family financial stability. In other words, the book perfectly anticipated the rise of reality TV competitions like “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race,” taken to a horrific extreme as only King can deliver. In this case, people have to outlast trained assassins trying to take them out. The longer they survive, the more money their families win.

The book was already turned into a film in the 1980s, but King isn’t a fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Running Man” adaptation. The material is being given new life by “Shaun of the Dead” director Edgar Wright, whose new version went into production in November 2024. This film will star “Top Gun: Maverick” actor Glen Powell as Ben Richards, the role previously played by Schwarzenegger, and Powell insists that the fresh take on the story will be worthwhile. “We’re really taking the Stephen King book and just adding a lot of fun Edgar Wright flavor to it, and it has been awesome,” he teased to ScreenRant. “That’s going to be a really fun one; I’m super excited about it.”

“The Running Man” is set to hit theaters in November 2025. Fittingly, the story was originally set in 2025; it’ll be fun to see how it’s been updated, given everything that’s happened in the world of reality television since it was written.

Stephen King published a novel called “The Institute” in 2019. It follows a young boy named Luke who has special abilities, which naturally attract the attention of a mysterious organization. After being kidnapped, Luke ends up at the titular Institute, locked up with other children who can do things like telekinesis. It’s familiar subject matter for, say, the author of “Firestarter,” but it’s a solid telling of a very King-ian story.

The novel is being adapted by producers Jack Bender and Ben Cavell, who are bringing “The Institute” to MGM+; they gave the show a series order in June 2024. Mary Louise Parker and Ben Barnes were set as the show’s leads. King told Deadline that he was happy about the news. “I’m delighted and excited at the prospect of ‘The Institute,’ with its high-intensity suspense, being filmed as a series. The combination of Jack Bender and Ben Cavell guarantees that the results will be terrific.”

The series was previewed at Content London with an expected release date sometime in 2025. Bender told the audience that episodes will be released weekly to build suspense, according to Variety, and he also revealed that they’d aged up the twelve year old protagonist of the book. “We didn’t want it to be a sadistic experience,” he said. “There’s a fine line and, god knows, as storytellers we didn’t want to go there.”

Prolific Stephen King adapter Mike Flanagan isn’t just preparing for the release of “The Life of Chuck.” He’s got several other King adaptations in the works, too, including a long-awaited television show based on King’s “Dark Tower” epic. The books were already turned into a movie, and quite recently, too; a film version came out in 2017, starring Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba. It wasn’t particularly well-received, with a dismal 16% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, but it found an audience on Netflix.

So, Flanagan would like to try again. It makes sense to do it as a television show, as “The Dark Tower” is a saga that covers eight main novels, pulling in characters and weaving together plots from across King’s oeuvre that can easily support multiple seasons. The books center around a universe-hopping battle between the forces of good and evil, represented by the gunslinger Roland Deschain and Randall Flagg respectively.

It’s a tricky story to map out, however, so Flanagan apologized to fans in 2024 for his adaptation taking so long. At New York Comic Con (via Vulture), he teased, “The only way to do it is to just do the books … It’s populated with such a richness of characters and scale and scope, eventually, but he starts that story with one person following another person in the barren desert. That’s how you do it.” Flanagan added, “It’s taking forever.”

“The Dark Tower” isn’t the only Stephen King adaptation Mike Flanagan is working on for television. He’s also been announced as the man behind a new re-imagining of “Carrie,” King’s first novel, for Amazon Prime Video. The story is about a girl who’s an outcast at high school, but the arrival of her period brings on telekinetic powers that frighten her. Infamously, it all culminates in a bloody prom, the kind of thing that lends itself well to on-screen mayhem. Maybe that’s why “Carrie” has been adapted numerous times already, including a now-classic horror film 1976 by Brian DePalma, a made-for-TV version in 2002, and a big-screen adaptation in 2013 that starred Chloe Grace Moretz. (There’s also “The Rage: Carrie 2,” but the less said about that ill-conceived sequel, the better.)

It’ll be interesting to see “Carrie” adapted for television. Thankfully, for a book with such a defined, classic climax, it doesn’t seem that Amazon wants the show to go on indefinitely. Instead, it’s been announced that “Carrie” will be an eight-episode limited series for the streamer.

Flanagan told MovieWeb that he’s looking forward to modernizing the story. “Carrie White walking through a metal detector is interesting to me. Carrie White with social media,” he said. “The iconic scene in the locker room is very different when people have phones in their hands. So that was the first germ of an idea.”

Stephen King’s “Fairy Tale” seems like the horror master might be writing something for young adults. After all, it’s about a teenager who travels to a fantastical realm, where he’s made to join the fight against all manner of evildoers. Along the way, he meets a number of characters with jobs like “shoemaker,” and he even is made to fight in a tournament, “Hunger Games” style. However, in typical Stephen King fashion, it’s a lot bloodier and scarier than a lot of similar YA tales.

It’s the kind of thing that would probably have done well if it was released as a film in the 2010s, in the wake of “The Hunger Games,” “The Maze Runner,” and the like. There’s just one problem: the book wasn’t published until 2022.

In October 2024, we learned that an adaptation of “Fairy Tale” was in the works from Paul Greengrass. While he initially tried to crack it as a film, the project moved over to A24 as a 10-episode limited series. Greengrass seems like an odd match for the fantastical subject material — after all, he revolutionized the action genre with the gritty realism of “The Bourne Identity” — but the series’ showrunner will be J.H. Wyman, who worked on “Fringe” and “Almost Human.” No release date is currently set.

Hollywood is a notoriously tricky town, and sometimes projects die on the vine. There are plenty of Stephen King adaptations that have been announced in recent years but then gone quiet, leaving fans to wonder whether we’ll actually get to see some of these visions.

J.J. Abrams was reportedly involved in a film adaptation of “Billy Summers,” a crime novel about a hitman undercover as a writer; there’s been no news since 2023. A production company called Bohemia Group purchased the rights to “The Regulators,” a Western about creepy invaders in suburbia, but we haven’t heard more since 2022. Blumhouse was working on a TV show based on “Later,” about a crime-solving teenager who can talk to ghosts, but that project went silent in 2022; that’s also the last time we heard “Stranger Things” creators The Duffer Brothers talk about their planned adaptation of “The Talisman.”

2021 gave us announcements about Jack Bender tackling “Elevation,” “Fear the Walking Dead” creator Dave Erickson adapting “The Jaunt,” “Bosch” producer Henrik Bastin doing “The Ten O’Clock People,” and Bryan Fuller planning a horny remake of “Christine.” Finally, to round out the decade, Lynne Ramsay announced “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon” in 2020. That year, the CW was working on “The Revelations of Becka Paulson,” and Max was developing “Throttle,” but all of those projects have since gone quiet, too. 

We’ll just have to wait and see if anything comes of any of these. But either way, there are plenty of upcoming Stephen King movies and TV shows in the works.