"There's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst." Words of wisdom from Rita Hayworth And Shawshank Redemption, the Stephen King novella from his 1982 collection Different Seasons, which was later made into a film you might have heard of. It's advice given to the prisoners in that story, but it could just as easily be sent the way of the Stephen King faithful. King is prolific like no American author (or, really, any author) before him, knocking out a good couple of books a year - not to mention short stories - before he got hit by a car in 1999. Which slowed him down to, like, one book a year. He's also unprecedented in the amount of times his work has been adapted for the small screen, stage (you know there's a Carrie musical, right?) and especially film. In fact, King is so closely intimate with cinema that he's written an entire non-fiction book about it, and has an initiative called Dollar Babies, where he'll sell the rights to short stories which Hollywood hasn't optioned to student filmmakers, for the princely sum of a dollar. Which is perhaps an attempt to balance the scales in relation to the quality of his film adaptations. Certain King stories have made for some bonafide cinematic classic, others... less so. To settle any debate, here is every Stephen King adaptation (not including: Dollar Babies, sequels to adaptations with original scripts, remakes, or that one film King wrote about incestuous cat people) ranked from worst to best.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
