Well it’s good news, just in, from the good folks at Cinematical! It looks like Stephen King’s novel, The Cell, will be coming to a screen near you (size and type of screen more likely your living room TV). In the following link, Cinematical posts some more information, including this excerpt, about the adaptation being written in TV mini-series style much like King’s The Stand in the mid 90’s:
Fangoria got out word today from the Fantasia Film Festival that Stephen King’s Cell is no longer destined for the silver screen. Instead the novel will be reborn as a four hour TV mini-series to be scripted by John Harrison. Details are rather sparse at this stage, but Harrison tells Fango his take on the material will be closer to a classic creeper like Village of the Damned (I hope Harrison is referring to the original and not the languid John Carpenter remake) than an all out zombie movie.
That’s sort of good to know. Personally, I think the book works better as a book, but I’m more comfortable with it not debuting the big screen mainly because of the amount of content in the book. This should be the right direction since a 90-120 minute run would compromise the quality of the story.
Maybe it’s just me but I think that as great as King’s novels are, they are very tough to translate to film mainly because he has sooo much content in each book. Many of the previous film adaptations seem awkward and don’t succeed because so much is stripped away from the core.
The one thing about the book that I never really bought into was the progression and evolution of the “flocks” and couldn’t see the ending playing out on film in a convincing manner. But we’ll see…
Lastly, this upcoming mini-series is not to be confused with a movie with a similar premise called The Signal, Cellular, or even The Cell. However, the style of The Signal is very close to how I would have imagined Cell to be if it was ever made.
Here’s hoping they can include all the right content while keeping the TV censors at bay. Anyone out there read the book? If so what are your thoughts about an adaptation??
