Mike Flanagan is writing The Mist. Not circling it, not developing it. Writing it, with a deadline.
Speaking to Collider at the Toronto International Film Festival on Wednesday, the filmmaker said the script for his adaptation of Stephen King’s 1980 novella is due around Halloween. “I’m writing it right now. I was working on it on the airplane here,” he said. Warner Bros. set the project up with him back in February, per Deadline, and this is the first sign that it has moved from a press release to actual pages. It is also a reunion. Flanagan made Doctor Sleep for the same studio in 2019, still the only film that has tried to reconcile King’s sequel novel with Kubrick’s The Shining and largely pulled it off.
Why Follow Frank Darabont at All
Darabont’s 2007 film is the reason that question gets asked every time this project comes up, and Flanagan appears to have an answer ready. Per Collider, he has no interest in remaking a movie he admires, and he says the differences between his version and Darabont’s start on the first page. He has put it before as a matter of route: the way in, the way through and the way out are all different ones.
The novella gives him room to mean that. King published The Mist in the 1980 anthology Dark Forces and collected it in Skeleton Crew five years later, and it ends with the survivors driving south into the white and no resolution at all. Darabont supplied one, and it did not come off the page. Nearly twenty years later it is still the first thing anybody brings up about the title, which is a strange inheritance for a new adaptation to walk into.
There is also the 2017 Mist series, which came and went in a single season on Spike. So this is the third pass at the same supermarket, and Flanagan is the first person to take it on with a real track record in long-form King behind him. That is the argument for doing it again, and it is a decent one.
The One That Arrives First
None of this changes October. Flanagan’s Carrie premieres on Prime Video on October 7, eight episodes with titles arranged like a class schedule, starting with “First Period.” Our look at the official Carrie trailer runs through what it shows. After that he has Rot, the body horror picture with Matthew Lillard, Amber Midthunder and Cooper Koch.
The Mist is the one after those, and Warner Bros. has not dated it. A script due by Halloween is not a release date, and nobody has said a word yet about casting, a shoot or a studio slot. But it is the first hard deadline this project has had, and it puts a King adaptation that has spent months as a headline on somebody’s desk by the end of the month.
The Mist goes on the release calendar the moment Warner Bros. gives it a day. For now it has a writer and a deadline.
