No worries: AMC still planning Stephen King’s Sleeping Beauties

January 17th 2020, 2:00pm

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

It was almost a full year ago we passed along word that AMC ordered a pilot script for an adaptation of Stephen and Owen King's novel SLEEPING BEAUTIES. And today we have word that AMC still plans to develop the series. So that's good.

Sarah Barnett, president of AMC Networks Entertainment Group and AMC Studios said:

We’re looking for highly original visions and voices as we think about how AMC Networks evolves. The projects in development both on the Entertainment Group side and at AMC Studios all embrace people with singular and surprising points of view. We will prioritize creative risk-taking that doesn’t rely on the shock and awe of sheer size, but instead delivers the surprise and delight of brilliant storytelling in our quest to stand out with human-scaled brands in this dynamic and changing content environment. There is so much phenomenal talent to discover and so many new, different, electric stories to be told.

Back in April 2019, Stephen King said :

I’m tremendously excited to see Sleeping Beauties brought to life in a format that will allow the story to be told as it was meant to be told, in all its mystery and drama.

Owen King added:

We’re so happy to be working with Michael, Ashley, and AMC on Sleeping Beauties. We can’t imagine a better match.

Here's the rundown on the book via Amazon:

In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep: they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent. And while they sleep they go to another place, a better place, where harmony prevails and conflict is rare. One woman, the mysterious “Eve Black,” is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease. Is Eve a medical anomaly to be studied? Or is she a demon who must be slain? Abandoned, left to their increasingly primal urges, the men divide into warring factions, some wanting to kill Eve, some to save her. Others exploit the chaos to wreak their own vengeance on new enemies. All turn to violence in a suddenly all-male world. Set in a small Appalachian town whose primary employer is a women’s prison, Sleeping Beauties is a wildly provocative, gloriously dramatic father-son collaboration that feels particularly urgent and relevant today.

This is, of course, just one of the Stephen King TV shows in the works. J.J. Abrams is producing a mini-series based on LISEY'S STORY for Apple with Julianne Moore starring alongside the likes of Clive Owen, Joan Allen, and Dane DeHaan with King himself writing all eight episodes. Oh, and let's not forget Ben Mendelsohn and Jason Bateman's adaptation of THE OUTSIDER currently airing on HBO.