J.J. Abrams Producing A New Stephen King Adaptation

There are adjustments afoot for a brand new Stephen King adaptation being pushed by J.J. Abrams. Once destined for tv, ‘Billy Summers’ will now turn into a film, in line with Deadline.

Published in 2021, ‘Billy Summers’ is likely one of the few titles written by King not designed to scare the dwelling daylights out of his readers (until your specific phobia is hitman doing one final job), and in reality falls into crime thriller territory.

Never heard of it? Here’s your fundamental synopsis… Billy Summers is a hitman who’s trying to retire and takes one final extremely profitable job to fill his financial institution steadiness. The job requires him to embed himself in a quiet city, the place he pretends to be an aspiring author (surprise if King needed to do a lot analysis for that one).

He units up in an workplace with a direct view of the place hitman Joel Allen might be delivered to face trial for taking pictures two males throughout a poker sport. Allen additionally has dedicated sufficient murders for some high-level mobsters to be scared the gunman will incriminate his former employers to reduce his sentence. Summers, a meticulous craftsman, turns into an increasing number of cynical concerning the mobsters who’ve employed him, and his skepticism is nicely warranted as issues go awry following the job’s completion.

How awry? Let’s develop on the story. When the common consumer doesn’t pay, Summers escapes a entice. His life will get much more difficult when he finds on the market’s a bounty on his life and he saves a rape sufferer named Alice. Summers and the lady find yourself on a cross-country journey to rectify the hit’s many wrongs.

Clearly Abrams remains to be completely happy to maintain making tasks primarily based on King’s work, together with his Bad Robot firm having beforehand produced ‘Lisey’s Story’, ‘Castle Rock’ and ‘11.22.63’. As it stands now, the corporate is producing alongside Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way. Which implies that ought to all concerned be proud of the script, Abrams could take the director’s chair with DiCaprio starring.

Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz are on script responsibility for this one, which, as we talked about on the prime of the story, was initially destined for TV (the writers make sense, since regardless of having moved on to profitable film careers, made their names engaged on the small display screen likes of ‘Thirtysomething’.

Bad Robot initially envisioned this as a 10-episode sequence, with Zwick and Herskovitz operating the present and Zwick directing a number of of the ensuing installments.

But after it was packaged up and shopped to networks and streaming companies in 2021, the staff determined it’d work higher as a film, and now Warner Bros. (the place Abrams nonetheless has a deal) has nabbed the rights and the artistic staff able to develop the film.