A story of Stephen King has three canceled adaptations (and that makes sense)

Stephen King’s massive body is a gold mine for Hollywood, to the point where there is never a kind of cinematographic adaptation of King Development’s books at a given moment. Of course, all King novels do not enjoy the same amount of Hollywood love; For each book as “Carrie” with its constant remakes, there is a book like “The Eyes of the Dragon”, which has never obtained film adaptation in the 40 years since its publication. The book is a story of surprisingly family fantastic adventure, one with some fun connections with the famous “Dark Tower” series by King.

The first attempt to adapt “The Eyes of the Dragon” came in 2000, when the French company WAMC Entertainment would have bought the rights and would have planned to transform it into an animated film. Ideally, the film would have had a budget of $ 45 million and was published in the early 2000s, but production stopped and WAMC finally lost the rights of the book.

The second attempt occurred in 2012, when the Syfy channel announced that it planned to transform “the eyes of the dragon” into mini-series. This project has dropped too much with few explanations. The third attempt occurred in 2019, when Hulu announced that he adapted the book in a television program. But the following year, producer / screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith unfortunately announced that Hulu had canceled the project. It is not clear if Covid was the big element that killed the project (as it was for so many other films and programs), but that certainly did not help.

To date, there is no project to adapt “the eyes of the dragon”, and even if there were, there would be no guarantee that these plans would not yet collapse in a year. What is the problem here? Why is it so difficult to withdraw an adaptation from the soil?

“The Eyes of the Dragon” was published for the first time in the 80s, at a time when Stephen King was at the top of the world, and he was immediately overshadowed by all the other recent bestsellers he had published. Towards the same period, this book was released, he had also published “Pet Sematary”, “It”, “Christine”, a book “Dark Tower” and the collection of new “Skeleton Crew”. It was a period when many of King’s best novels were published in rapid succession, which means that “the eyes of the dragon” is even worse in comparison.

What is the problem with that? Well, the characters are not so memorable, and the fantasy does not define everything that is fleshed out. He was also out of brand for King at the time; He was known as a horror writer, not a high fantasy writer, and the general consensus on “Eyes of the Dragon” was that King was better to stick to his familiar path. The most disturbing of everyone may be that “the eyes of the dragon” was supposed to be a children’s book. The cute and innocent vibrations of history were not what King fans were waiting for or wanted him.

It would not be so important if King had fully adopted the capture of the children’s market, but he did not do it either. He wrote in the foreword of the book that he wanted to write a story so that his young daughter could take advantage of it, but an important part of the first act focuses on the adult character Roland and his marital difficulties with erectile dysfunction. (Or maybe Roland is supposed to be gay; I could never quite understand this part.)

The result was a book that was not entirely for adults and which was not entirely for children, existing in an awkward field which is not easy to market. Will there ever be a finite adaptation “Eyes of the Dragon”? I don’t know, but if there is, it will probably never reach the peaks in popularity that his other more adult works have appreciated.