Firestarter: Blumhouse’s Stephen King adaptation has been rated R

When The Vigil director Keith Thomas was gearing up to go into production on Blumhouse’s new adaptation of the 1980 Stephen King novel Firestarter (buy a copy HERE), he said the script for the film had “everything you would want”, including “people’s heads catching fire and their faces melting off”. Firestarter has since been shot and cut together, and as you would expect from something that had things like that in the script, it has now earned an R rating.

FilmRatings.com reports that Firestarter is officially rated R for “Violent Content“.

Written by Scott Teems (Halloween Kills), this take on Firestarter tells the story of 

a young girl who develops pyrokinetic abilities and is abducted by a secret government agency that wants to harness her powerful gift as a weapon.

The film stars Ryan Kiera Armstrong (American Horror Story) as “firestarter” Charlie McGee, Zac Efron (Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile) as Charlie’s father Andy, Sydney Lemmon (Fear the Walking Dead) as Charlie’s mother and Andy’s wife Vicky, Michael Greyeyes (Blood Quantum) as the assassin Rainbird, and Gloria Reuben (ER) in an unspecified lead role.

This Firestarter is coming to us from Blumhouse, Weed Road Productions, and Universal Pictures. Blumhouse founder Jason Blum is producing with Akiva Goldsman. The late Martha De Laurentiis served as executive producer alongside Teems. At one time, Goldsman had been attached to direct the film, and at another point Fatih Akin was going to direct it.

Here’s the description of King’s novel:

Andy McGee and Vicky Tomlinson were once college students looking to make some extra cash, volunteering as test subjects for an experiment orchestrated by the clandestine government organization known as The Shop. But the outcome unlocked exceptional latent psychic talents for the two of them—manifesting in even more terrifying ways when they fell in love and had a child. Their daughter, Charlie, has been gifted with the most extraordinary and uncontrollable power ever seen—pyrokinesis, the ability to create fire with her mind. Now the merciless agents of The Shop are in hot pursuit to apprehend this unexpected genetic anomaly for their own diabolical ends by any means necessary…including violent actions that may well ignite the entire world around them as Charlie retaliates with a fury of her own….

The novel was previously turned into a film directed by Mark L. Lester and starring Drew Barrymore, David Keith, Heather Locklear, Martin Sheen, George C. Scott, Louise Fletcher, and Art Carney in 1984. Copies of Lester’s Firestarter can be purchased HERE.

A release date for the new film has yet to be announced, but hopefully we’ll be hearing one soon now that it has a rating.