Well this is unexpected! As you may or may not know, the inaugural Overlook Film Festival is currently running up in Oregon. The Blumhouse team is attending, including Jason Blum himself, and a surprise announcement has come out of the festival. After the premiere screening of Akiva Goldsman‘s supernatural horror tale, Stephanie, Blum and Goldsman laid out their next project together: Firestarter.
The duo have teamed up to re-adapt the classic Stephen King novel, with Goldsman directing and co-writing the screenplay. His fellow scribe on this project will be Scott Teems (“Rectify“, The Evening Sun). A longtime big shot screenwriter/producer in Hollywood, Goldsman made his directorial debut with 2014’s Winter’s Tale. The upcoming Stephanie is his sophomore effort. Firestarter could potentially be his third, depending on how soon he gets Avengelyne off the ground at Paramount.
Blum and Goldsman on this next collaboration…
“Akiva and Stephen King have a long relationship. We wouldn’t do it unless he had blessed it.” Blum noted that King would also have a producing credit on the production. “He wouldn’t do it unless he trusted Akiva’s hand with it,” Blum said. “We’re already working on it and now it’s official.”
“We’re going to be looking back to the book to do it well,” Goldsman said. “We have tremendous love for the original object. Scott is a wonderful writer…He’s typing very fast because there’s a writers strike coming. We’re really looking forward to attending the text the way it was written.”
Going back to the book is a smart move. While I have a soft spot for the previous 1984 adaptation (pictured above), there’s a lot of room for improvement and the source material is ripe for a new film. I have little doubt that many are shaking their heads at Goldsman’s involvement, however. To put it mildly, the man doesn’t have the best reputation these days, after almost 20 years of mediocre-to-bad films in his screenwriting CV.
I cannot speak to his abilities as a director, as I haven’t seen Winter’s Tale, although it too carries a bad reputation. So for the sake of optimism, I’ll play Devil’s Advocate for a moment here. The downside is that Goldsman does not have a good pedigree with film fans. That much is clear. The upsides are Blumhouse and Scott Teems.
Starting with the latter, Teems’ work on “Rectify” is nothing to sneer at and him sharing writing duties with Goldsman gives me hope when it comes to the screenplay. As for Blumhouse, their involvement is a positive in two ways. The first is that they tend to only re-team with a filmmaker on a project if they are very happy with their first collaboration. More often than not, the worse films in their slate were one and done collaborations with the respective filmmakers.
Second, it should keep the budget down. The last thing anyone needs is a $50 million FX extravaganza of a new Firestarter movie. Few things are worse than watching someone unconvincingly aflame in CGI fire and blazing people is exactly what this film will be filled with. Of course there’s no guarantee that this production will stick with practical pyrotechnics whenever possible, but that’s certainly the hope. In a movie called Firestarter, if the fire itself isn’t believable, then the picture has already failed.
For now, I choose to look towards this project with cautious optimism. The source material remains extremely promising and Blumhouse has been upping their game lately (for the most part). It’d be nice to see this be another win for not only them, but King adaptations in general. With The Dark Tower, It, and Gerald’s Game on the horizon, I was wondering when others might follow suit on the theatrical adaptation front. I now have my answer.
