Stephen King’s The Life of Chuck Starring Tom Hiddleston First Images Released

Ahead of its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, preview images of Mike Flanagan’s upcoming Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck have arrived online. Vanity Fair has a handful of images from the film, which centers on the life of Charles Krantz, who dies at 39 years old…at the beginning of the movie. In interviews, the cast and creators of the movie pitch it as life-affirming and positive, so don’t expect the usual King horror — this is more in the spirit of The Shawshank Redemption or Stand By Me. This is not Flangan’s first rodeo with King, either; he rose to prominence in large part due to his successful adaptation of Gerald’s Game, and followed it up with Doctor Sleep.

The Life of Chuck is based on a short story from the If It Bleeds anthology, which also features the story “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone,” which has been adapted for Netflix and is coming soon. The movie stars Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Matthew Lillard, Heather Langenkamp, and a number of Flanagan regulars including Rahul Kohli and David Dastmalchian.

The logline for the project characterizes it as “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.”

You can see some images here, and more over at the Vanity Fair article.

In addition to The Life of Chuck, Flanagan is currently developing a new adaptation of King’s epic series The Dark Tower. He acquired the rights before his overall deal at Netflix ran out and he jumped ship to Amazon Studios, but at present, The Dark Tower doesn’t have an official home. 

“Predating our deal with Amazon, we acquired the rights to The Dark Tower, which if you know anything about me, you know it has been my Holy Grail of a project for most of my life,” Flanagan shared last December. “We actually have those rights carved out of our Amazon deal, which doesn’t mean that they can’t or won’t get behind it at some point — you don’t know. But that’s something we’ve been developing ourselves and are really passionate about finally getting it up on its feet at some point.”

It’s likely The Dark Tower will be easier for Flanagan to sell than most.  Still, after numerous false starts and the disastrous performance of the 2017 feature film adaptation, it’s a project with a lot of baggage and likely a lot of studios won’t even look at it.

There is no wide release date yet for The Life of Chuck. The project heads to TIFF this week.