Stephen King is enjoying a new renaissance these days, with Warner Bros. having bet big on the classic horror author as he continues into his career of self-populating an entire library with his own creepy crawlies. The latest adaptation from Bad Robot and the studio behind IT chapters 1 and 2, Billy Summers, is based on King’s recent novel about a hitman.
The Hollywood Reporter reports that while J.J. Abrams will be producing alongside Warner Bros., word is currently out on if the director will make the King pic his next directorial effort, despite having not directed anything since 2019.
Stephen King has been enjoying a renaissance, not only in terms of his massive output, but in terms of having a second era of adaptation after adaptation coming out. The 2010s have seen the kind of product that he had going in the 1980s and 1990s when almost every year saw a new King adaptation or two and then dwindled off in the early 2000s. In the last decade, there’ve been numerous King series—such as Under the Dome and 11.22.63—as well as movies which include Carrie, IT, Pet Sematary and Firestarter remakes as well as original films like Doctor Sleep and Mr. Harrigan’s Phone. The latest to get the big screen treatment is Billy Summers, King’s 2021 novel about a hitman going out for one last job.
The film is coming from J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot whose shingle with Warner Bros. is proving to be pretty lucrative with the duo already making a Hot Wheels movie based on the best-selling Mattel racing car toys and now they’re teaming up to head in another direction with another story about a road trip, though being in a car with a hitman devised by Stephen King is pretty different from the colorful loop-the-loops of the Mattel toy. In fact, the story is incredibly dark, told from multiple points of view despite supposedly being written by one character, that being the titular Summers, who comes to describe not only his life but what went wrong during his last job.
The character is an ex-marine sniper in his mid-40s—sort of a Barry-type character—who is heading out on one last job which in any of these types of stories, means it’s not going to be smooth sailing. He details his life up that point, where things goes sideways, and then what happens when he saves a woman named Alice from being raped and tries to set about righting his wrongs. J.J. Abrams is working on a new Star Wars movie, but hasn’t directed anything since the critically lambasted The Rise of Skywalker, and would be a perfect project for the director to distance himself from that galaxy far, far away with a hitman named Billy Summers.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter