Stephen King fans have something to look forward to next summer. NEON, the company behind hits such as Parasite and Longlegs, has picked up director Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month. The news was first reported by Variety, with NEON later confirming the news on social media. The company confirmed that the film will hit theaters next summer, though no specific release date was revealed.
Welcome home, Chuck.⁰Mike Flanagan’s incredible adaptation of Stephen King’s THE LIFE OF CHUCK will be in theaters everywhere next Summer. pic.twitter.com/js87FURO14
— NEON (@neonrated) September 26, 2024
Flanagan, who previously directed King adaptations such as Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep, made the film last year independently while the SAG and WGA strikes were raging on, with most of Hollywood shut down. The film received rave reviews coming out of TIFF, earning the prestigious audience award. That has often been a predictor of Oscar nominations. That might be why NEON is waiting until next year to release it, to give them more time to prepare for an awards season run.
Tom Hiddleston (Loki) leads the cast of the movie, with Karen Gillan (Guardians of the Galaxy), Jacob Tremblay (Doctor Sleep), Matthew Lillard (Scream) and Mark Hamill (The Fall of the House of Usher) also starring, among others. The novella was originally published in 2020 as part of King’s short story collection If it Bleeds. The logline for the story reads as follows:
“The Life of Chuck is three separate stories linked to tell the biography of Charles Krantz in reverse, beginning with his death from a brain tumor at 39 and ending with his childhood in a supposedly haunted house.”
“By the end of it, I was in tears, and incredibly uplifted, and convinced I'd read maybe the best thing that he'd written in a decade. I just was floored by the thing,” Flanagan recently said to Vanity Fair of reading King’s novella for the first time. “So I fired off an email to him right away saying how much I loved the story, how incredible I thought it was, how meaningful, and important, and how it had really tattooed itself on my heart and said, ‘It's the movie I want to make so that it'll exist in the world for my kids.'”
Flangan remains extremely busy. Aside from this movie, he’s also getting ready to make his new Exorcist movie for Universal and Blumhouse. Meanwhile, the modern horror master is continuing to prep his series adaptation of King’s The Dark Tower.
Look for The Life of Chuck in theaters next summer. For more, read Fango’s in-depth interview with Flanagan about Doctor Sleep.
