Stephen King’s From a Buick 8 Adaptation Gets Disappointing Update

Back in 2018, reports about an adaptation of Stephen King’s From a Buick 8 emerged, and with very few updates about the project being revealed since Thomas Jane officially boarded the project in 2019, the actor confirmed that his take on the material had been cancelled. Jane noted that it was the delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic that impacted the entire industry that resulted in the rights to the project lapsing, while he also teased that the story may have found life with James Wan. According to Jane, the script crafted by Wan’s team at Atomic Monster is promising enough that it could move forward, though if that iteration fails to come together, he could regain the rights.

“We had Jim Mickle, and, in fact, the week we were supposed to go out and pitch it is when the world shut down. So we put that on hold,” Jane revealed to The Kingcast podcast. “And then when we started kind of creeping out of the pandemic, I got Mark [Fergus] and Hawk [Ostby], who wrote Children of Men and Iron Man 3,  and they also helped create The Expanse. So I brought them on board, and we were working on it. And then we had to rug pulled out from under us because Stephen’s agent had actually … Without bothering to tell us, he’d informed us that our lease had lapsed … It was just because of the pandemic. Technically, the option had lapsed a long time ago because nobody was doing anything … so it was just a matter of miscommunication.”

He continued, “I think James Wan’s company has it now. And we were hoping that they would turn in a different draft that nobody liked, but apparently they do like it! Because, obviously, we were first in line to get back. So, we’ll see what happens. We continue to follow it. The road from script to screen can be long and circuitous. So we’ll see what happens. But yeah, that was disappointing.”

Stephen King’s website describes the 2002 novel, “Shortly after his father, a Pennsylvania state trooper, is killed in a senseless automobile accident, Ned Wilcox discovers that the members of Troop D have a secret concealed behind their headquarters. Curtis Wilcox’s friends and colleagues take turns relating the twenty-year history of the mysterious Buick Roadmaster locked in Shed B and how its discovery and unexplained behavior has captivated the tightly knit group of men for two decades. The Buick seems to be a conduit to another reality and every now and then it breathes, inhaling a little bit of this world, exhaling a little bit of whatever world it came from.”

Jane has starred in King adaptations Dreamcatcher, The Mist, and 1922, so if the actor doesn’t manage to bring From a Buick 8 to life, we doubt this is the last King project he’ll be involved in,

Stay tuned for possible updates on the From a Buick 8 movie.

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