9 Best Changes Stephen King Movies Made From The Books
Translation from page to screen can be tricky, but these movies nailed it.
Stephen King is without a doubt one of the greatest storytellers ever to have lived.
With an absolutely staggering catalogue of written works featuring hundreds of stories, and having millions and millions of book sales to his name, it's hardly any wonder that Hollywood comes knocking so often for the rights to his stories.
When you consider how many of these adaptations have gone on to become well-received and well-loved movies in their own right - The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption and The Shining, to name a few - you'd be hard pressed to find a person who hasn't appreciated his work at some point in their life.
All that said, there's always a writer, producer or director that thinks they can improve on King's stories, and this doesn't always end well. Take the 2018 adaptation of King's fantasy series The Dark Tower, for instance, and you might see how taking creative liberties with the author's work can backfire spectacularly.
This isn't always the case, though. Every so often, Hollywood picks up the rights to a King story and allows changes to be made which are actually an active improvement on King's original work. Sometimes it's omitting plot points or changing King's endings, and others it's simple little things that just fit better within the overall narrative. Here are 9 such times when Stephen King movies made improvements on their source material.
9. Kubrick's Touch - The Shining
Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of King's novel of the same name is undoubtedly a classic.
King himself has gone on record to voice his dislike of the movie, and his reasons are understandable. Kubrick made a number of changes and omissions from King's story, most notably the removal of the more supernatural elements of the book, including the Overlook's sinister personality and its subsequent possession of Jack's mind.
While the book is an in-depth tale with a steadily increasing tension throughout, Kubrick was limited by the runtime of an average movie, and was presented with the impossible task of translating a long and nuanced story to the big screen.
While King may not have appreciated Kubrick's efforts, the end result is a movie that is deserving of all the praise heaped upon it. It's appropriately suspenseful and terrifying, with all of the threatening and horrifying imagery that you'd expect from a King adaptation.
The removal of certain plot points, while a sore subject for many fans of the novel, was a necessity for the movie's success, and no-one can argue that it delivered on that front.