Firestarter Remake: First Clip Released

This weekend, Stephen King’s Firestarter is getting yet another screen adaptation. Zac Efron stars in the updated take on Firestarter, nearly 40 years after the original arrived in theaters. The new take, from director Keith Thomas, hits theaters this weekend and will be made available to stream on Peacock the same day. Ahead of the hybrid launch, Blumhouse and Universal have partnered with IMDb to release the first full clip from the film.

In the Firestarter clip, which you can watch below, Efron’s Andy McGee is doing his best to save his powerful young daughter, Charlie. As Andy tries to talk down the man holding her at knifepoint, Charlie’s powers begin to reveal themselves. You can watch the clip in the video below!

Firestarter remains a popular and influential Stephen King book, so much so that it is now on its second feature film adaptation. Fans obviously want to see something that faithfully represents the book and first movie, but a new film also needs to stand on its own. That was the challenge ahead of Keith Thomas when he took on the project.

“When I first signed on to it, I had read the script and I knew the book, I’d read the book several times. I’d seen the original film countless times, and so I knew the story,” Thomas told ComicBook.com’s Patrick Cavanaugh in an exclusive interview. “And so when I read [Scott] Teems’ script, I saw what he was doing, the changes he was making, the interesting ways he was taking it. And I thought it was very appealing.”

He continued, “To me, the novel’s in print, it’s always around. Everybody can read it at any time and get that story. The 1984 film is very close to the book in terms of the beats and the way the plot operates. And I thought that exists, it’s wonderful, there’s an amazing Blu-ray of it that anyone can buy and see. I want to do something that’s a little different that is both a remix of the same story, in terms of telling it just from a slightly different direction, and it gives me an opportunity to, I don’t want to say put my imprint on it, but it’s more to approach it from a perspective that I feel like speaks to myself as a filmmaker and the stories that I want to tell.”

Firestarter arrives in theaters and on Peacock on May 13th.