2025 Was Ripe With Great Stephen King Movie Adaptations

The year kicked off with Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, a tale taken from King’s 1985 short story collection Skeleton Crew. However, whilst King’s story is comparatively brief, focusing on protagonist Hal Shelburn after his son Petey uncovers the titular toy simian whose banging cymbals act as a harbinger of death, Perkins’ film expands the central premise into what is essentially Final Destination with laughs.

Whilst the film garnered mixed reviews, there is much to enjoy. The enduring legacy of the Destination franchise (itself celebrating a sixth entry this year with Bloodlines) proves that audiences still have an appetite for inventive kills where characters meet a grisly end in unfortunate accidents, something The Monkey has in spades. As the trailer boasted “those deaths are really fucked up” (and with producer James Wan onboard, we’d expect nothing else).

People get harpooned, set on fire, have their faces mashed by bowling balls, swallow hornets, or are beheaded over dinner. At one point, Hal (Theo James) is standing a little too close as someone explodes, leaving him soaked in gore and spitting out a severed finger. The slapstick – like the blood – comes thick and fast.

But there are interesting themes among the entrails. Given the high death count, Hal begins to think about what it means to live, even as he struggles to reconnect with his estranged son, Petey (Colin O’Brien, star of another King adaptation, Mr. Harrigan’s Phone), and his unhinged twin (also James). Like the violence, it’s all played pretty broadly, yet still manages to land moments of surprising emotional depth, confirming Perkins as a major voice in mainstream horror (particularly after last year’s Longlegs and this year's Keeper, which was released soon after).

Coming a few months later, Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck couldn’t be more different. If The Monkey is a set-piece murder film, Chuck is both sprawling and indefinable. Based on another short story – this time taken from King’s 2020 collection If It Bleeds – it tells the tale of Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston), dividing his life into three chapters, each with its own distinctive focus.

To say much more would risk spoiling the enigmatic qualities Chuck has to offer. Although the short story isn’t King’s tightest work, it still boasts many of his signature tropes, from cosmic-level threats, intimate character beats, ghosts, death, curses, kids and the moments that make life worth living in the first place.

Flanagan, too, is proving himself to be a natural King collaborator, following in the vein of Frank Darabont (Shawshank, The Green Mile, The Mist) and Rob Reiner (Stand By Me, Misery). What those directors intuitively understood is that the power of King’s work doesn’t primarily come from his monsters but from his characters and their humanity. Flanagan has shown this same aptitude here, as he did in his previous King adaptations, Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game.

Whether the film entirely works is down to the individual  (it is, perhaps, aloof to the point of being hard to connect with), but one thing is for sure: it couldn’t be more different from The Monkey.

(We're also partial to the Scott Wampler and Eric Vespe cameo.)

The same applies to the next film. The Long Walk, directed by Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games series), is based on a 1979 novel by King, released under his pseudonym Richard Bachman (he originally wrote it in 1966-67 whilst a college freshman, technically making this his first novel).

For a King property that has been around for so long, the film adaptation had a – ahem – long walk to the screen: as early as ’88, George Romero was attached to direct, but Frank Darabont acquired the rights, which then passed to New Line and eventually to Lionsgate. In the end, Lawrence emerged as the perfect choice for director, building on his experience making YA dystopias and producing something that was both familiar (a bunch of kids play a life-or-death game) and brutally gritty.

Indeed, some audiences were not prepared for how hard The Long Walk goes: from tragic deaths to on-screen diarrhea, it’s unremittingly grim, though it's seasoned by an elegiac pathos that injects the proceedings with delicate beauty.

It also acts as an incredible platform for a next-level ensemble. Given that the plot involves characters who must keep walking no matter what (if they slow below 3 mph, death awaits), much is made of the conversations they have along the way. In this, Cooper Hoffman (Philip Seymour’s son, Licorice Pizza) and David Jonsson (Alien: Romulus) excel. Their performances – along with Ben Wang, Judy Greer, and Mark Hamill, who also stars in Chuck – give The Long Walk a deep seam of humanism.

It might be about a nightmare endurance challenge, but ultimately it emerges as a treatise on how different people face death when their number is up.

If King’s Bachman era proved fertile ground for The Long Walk, it also worked for Edgar Wright’s new film, a reimaging of The Running Man. As well as nodding to the original adaptation starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Wright sought to put his own unique stamp of hyper-kinetic zip on this, another story about a dystopian game with life-and-death stakes.

Here Glenn Powell stars as Ben Richards, an everyman with anger management issues who signs up to the titular show where he must evade assassins – and the general public – for 30 days to walk away with enough cash to save his sick daughter.

Whilst the original film has achieved cult classic status, it’s still largely seen as a second-tier Schwarzenegger vehicle, which, in the star’s own words, is the only one of his films he wanted to see redone.

With 2025 winding down, King’s star shows no sign of waning. On TV, It: Welcome to Derry continues to build on the Muschietti movies, and numerous other adaptations are in development or post-production, chief among them being Mike Flanagan’s reimagining of Carrie for Amazon Prime.

Whatever the future holds, it doesn’t look like King is going anywhere, and whilst adaptations might vary in quality, it’s clear that his work will continue to inspire filmmakers for years to come.