19-Year-Old Sci-Fi Adaptation Stephen King & Mike Flanagan Both Love Has Aged Like Fine Wine

Published Aug 1, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT

The upcoming IT: Welcome to Derry season 2 ensures that King won’t soon lose that crown, although another hotly anticipated screen adaptation of the author’s work will arrive on the small screen even sooner than the sophomore season of 2025’s hit prequel. Mike Flanagan’s Carrie will mark The Haunting of Hill House writer/director’s fourth stab at adapting King’s work, after 2017’s Netflix movie Gerald’s Game, 2019’s dark The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep, and 2024's The Life of Chuck.

While Flanagan will take on King’s mammoth dark fantasy series The Dark Tower for Prime Video after Carrie arrives, that’s not the only other upcoming King adaptation. King’s longest novel ever, the epic post-apocalyptic fantasy The Stand, will soon be adapted into a movie by Mr. & Mrs. Smith director Doug Liman, following a critically lambasted 2020 CBS Access miniseries version of the story. Meanwhile, Flanagan and King will team up once more for a new adaptation of a King novella previously turned into a 2007 movie, The Mist.

The Mist Was Somewhat Divisive Upon Release, But Has Aged Wonderfully

An intense siege horror story set largely in a supermarket surrounded by the eponymous supernatural mist, The Mist is a King novella originally published in 1980. In 2007, The Shawshank Redemption director Frank Darabont adapted the novella as an R-rated horror movie that received largely positive reviews, but didn’t become a cult classic until a few years later. While The Mist enjoyed a solid box office performance, the movie only became known as one of King’s most underrated adaptations in the years that followed.

With a stacked cast that includes Thomas Jane, Andre Braugher, and a career-best Marcia Gay Harden, The Mist is an unapologetically brutal monster movie that doubles as a dark social commentary on small-town bigotry and religious fanaticism. The Mist notably has one of the darkest Stephen King endings ever, a change from the source story that left some critics dismayed, but one which delighted King himself.

Flanagan is just as big a fan of the revised ending, telling Entertainment Weekly, “It’s one of the most brutal movies. That ending is jaw-dropping.” Of course, Flanagan soon clarified that his love of Darabont’s existing movie of The Mist means “My way into the story, through the story, and out of that story is very different.” Flanagan promises that his version of The Mist will be an entirely original take, although this isn’t the first time the movie’s story has been reinterpreted onscreen.

Mike Flanagan Is Right To Take A Different Approach With The Mist

In 2017, Spike released a ten-episode series based on The Mist starring Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland and American Horror Story franchise star Frances Conroy. Despite the cast’s pedigree, this new take on the story was written off as overly mean-spirited and hopeless by critics, which is a fairly striking issue considering just how remorselessly bleak the ending of Darabont’s movie already was.

The failure of this series proves just how much Flanagan is right to take a completely fresh, new approach to The Mist, since any attempt to outdo the brutality of Darabont’s 2007 original will also certainly be met by the same critical distaste as this 2017 flop. Thus, Carrie director Mike Flanagan’s upcoming take on Stephen King’s The Mist must feel as unique as the 2007 movie did when the creature feature first arrived on screens almost 20 years ago.

Source: Entertainment Weekly