With six major film and television adaptations added to the already gargantuan list, 2025 was a banner year for Stephen King adaptations.
This year’s entries in King’s adaptation arsenal ranged from good to great, oddly including both of the horror writer’s forays into nightmarish, competition-based stories, and saw a return to perhaps his greatest property. Whether you’re a fan of his work through adaptations or you’re a constant reader who wrings your hands in hopes that they do justice to a favorite book, there was a lot to love this year.
Here’s every 2025 Stephen King adaptation ranked.
6. “The Institute”
“The Institute’s” place at the bottom of this list doesn’t make it a bad show. Instead, it indicates what a good year it was for Stephen King adaptations. That said, there were times where the story diverged from the source material in shocking ways – mainly in the way the MGM+ series plans to play out for several seasons after the psychic children who were kidnapped and taken to the titular institute razed it to the ground before the finale. With most of the major players dead or on the run, it’s equally confusing and intriguing to see where the series goes when it returns, but without King’s book as a template, I worry.
5. “The Running Man”
“The Running Man” had so much going for it – a charismatic lead character from Glen Powell, solid direction from Edgar Wright – and yet the pieces never really coalesced into a whole. Powell feels obligated to play the role of angry Ben Richards, but when his charm comes through, it seems jarring to the character. Wright’s unique talent and directing style only translates into certain scenes rather than the entire film, so much of the two-hour, 15-minute film feels like a by-the-numbers dystopian film.
That said, there’s still a lot to enjoy in the first two-thirds of “The Running Man.” It’s only in the final act that all the cracks are finally noticeable and the plane is about to make a rather rough (cannon) landing – if you know, you know.
4. “The Monkey”
“The Monkey” is crazy. “The Monkey” probably won’t be for everyone. “The Monkey” was really for me. As a follow-up to his hugely popular film “Longlegs,” Osgood Perkins opted for a Stephen King adaptation that also made some pretty significant changes, while imbuing it with Looney Tunes levels of violence as a man attempts to track down and destroy a toy monkey that brings death and bad omens to anyone who owns it. The result is what is sneakily one of the best comedies of the year, with fun performances from Theo James and Tatiana Maslany. For all the other sickos who find their solace in hyper-violent horror films, this one is a serious modern contender.
3. “It: Welcome to Derry”
Stephen King’s “It” is such a gargantuan project to adapt that much of it ended up on the cutting room floor, even after Andy Muschietti spread the story through two films. Fortunately for HBO and King’s Constant Readers, the thirst for stories in Derry was almost as great as Pennywise’s thirst for children. “It: Welcome to Derry” examined the city in an earlier cycle of hunting and haunting the cosmic killer.
The HBO series continues the solid scares and storytelling of the films on display and Bill Skarsgård remains deeply captivating as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. If you’re looking for solid horror on the small screen, then “Welcome to Derry” represented one of the best in 2025.
2. “The Life of Chuck”
“The Life of Chuck” may have been a little too saccharine for some when the credits finally rolled, but for me it worked very well. Mike Flanagan’s latest Stephen King adaptation tells the inverted life story of average tax accountant Chuck Krantz. From the apocalyptic destruction of the world in his head burning on his deathbed, to an awkward teenager’s dance lessons, “The Life of Chuck” captures the beauty of ordinariness, and the fact that a life well lived often comes down simply to the people you choose to let in – whether you know you do or not.
1. “The Long Walk”
As a long-time fan of Stephen King’s books, “The Long Walk” has always been a book that I have felt underrated. This is also the selection I offered to people who wanted to try the author but were intimidated by the intimidating nature of some of his classics, like “It” or “The Stand”. So there were some concerns when the adaptation was announced, but Francis Lawrence’s version of the story knocked it out of the park and improved the book in some ways.
The film doesn’t shy away from the brutality of these games in a way that Lawrence’s PG-13 “Hunger Games” films can’t fully capture. Despite the carnage of these boys dying, it’s the quiet moments in which the contestants talk, bond, and vent, knowing they’ll likely be dead just a few miles away, that make the film sing. Please note that if 2025 wasn’t a busy year for the Best Actor category, I would be disgusted by David Jonsson’s performance in “The Long Walk” — I would still do it anyway.
