10 Stephen King Adaptations The Author HATES

10. The Running Man

In the late 70s and early 80s King enjoyed a prolific second career as pulp action writer Richard Bachman. Under the Bachman pseudonym, King knocked out this futuristic gameshow chase story in less than a week.

By the time of the 1987 movie adaptation, King had been "outed" as Bachman. But he still insisted that his own name be kept off the film and the fictional Bachman receive all of the credit.

Perhaps King didn't want to be associated with the finished product because, while the movie remains a dystopian cult favourite, it also has very little in common with its source material.

In The Importance Of Being Bachman, King's introduction to the collected edition of his "Bachman Books", the writer complained that his scrawny, sickly protagonist Ben Richards was "as far away from the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in the movie as you can get."

For his part, Arnie wasn't exactly thrilled with the completed movie either. The Austrian Oak had signed on for director Andrew Davis's vision of the film and was disappointed with the work of Paul Michael Glaser who stepped in after the Under Siege helmer was fired.

Glaser "shot the movie like it was a television show, losing all the deeper themes", Schwarzenegger wrote in his autobiography, Total Recall, proving himself King's surprising ally in not liking a film that most audiences think has aged pretty well.