Stephen King Favorite Mike Flanagan Reveals Why He’s Remaking The Mist (And He Has King’s Blessing)
Mike Flanagan is remaking The Mist, and he has the blessing of Stephen King. This isn’t the first time that someone has turned The Mist into a movie, as Frank Darabont did it before. At one time, there wasn’t a better King filmmaker than Darabont, who previously directed The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, both Oscar-contending movies based on King stories. However, with Darabont semi-retired, Flanagan has stepped into that role. Flanagan directed Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck, and he has the upcoming Carrie series coming to Prime Video. He is also remaking The Mist, and he explained why he is making a movie that was already a great release by Darabont.
“It’s one of the most brutal movies I’ve ever seen,” Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly. “That ending is jaw-dropping. My way into the story, through the story, and out of that story is very different. When I presented that to Steve [King] — that was also important because he loves Frank’s movie — it’s like, Why are we doing this? What are we gonna do that justifies itself? So it’s a different type of adaptation for me.”
Mike Flanagan Has Proven He Knows How to Make His Own Unique Adaptations
Flanagan said that after he spoke to King about his ideas for The Mist, he received King’s blessing. He also compared it to his Carrie series, where Flanagan said it is like taking “LEGOs apart” and building something new out of them. Flanagan won’t make anything compared to what Darabont did, a movie that King has praised for delivering an ending no one wanted. It makes sense that the director wanted to do something that was different while living in the same world.
With Carrie, Flanagan has updated the story to the modern day. Based on the early Carrie trailers, he has added things like Carrie being humiliated online, and her tormentors being a different kind of bully than the ones she faced in the classic Sissy Spacek movie, or even the previous remake with Chloë Grace Moretz. This is no surprise because Flanagan has worked miracles in the past.
Flanagan directed Doctor Sleep in 2019, and that movie did something special. Flanagan turned it into a sequel to both Stephen King’s novel and Stanley Kubrick’s movie, which are both different. King has publicly said how much he dislikes Kubrick’s movie, which he feels took away the meaning of his novel by making Jack Torrance a villain from the start, while the novel had the hotel corrupt him. What Flanagan did was have the story follow the events of Kubrick’s movie, but then he had Danny destroy the hotel like his dad did in the novel, finally ending the curse of that structure.
Now, Flanagan has a chance to reimagine The Mist. He won’t deliver a story anything like what Darabont did, and his movie will likely not only tell a fresh story, but have a different ending and a different set of characters. This has already been done before when Spike TV released The Mist TV series in 2017 to lackluster reviews and disappointing ratings, being cancelled after one season. That show tried to do something different, and it failed, but Flanagan has a proven track record, and it will be exciting to see what he does with The Mist in his remake.
What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
