Netflix is facilitating Mike Flanagan’s Gerald’s Game

Last Updated on July 31, 2021

Director Mike Flanagan (OCULUS, OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL) has been struggling to get an adaptation of Stephen King's GERALD'S GAME off the ground for some time. However, following the success of his film HUSH on the Netflix streaming platform, the company is now eyeing his next project.

Says Flanagan in an interview with Rue Morgue:

It’s a real challenge for financiers and distributors, who say, ‘Yeah, we love your work, we love Stephen King, but this story, this particular story? We don’t know how it works,’ without reshaping it to fit a much more conventional structure, which I did not want to do. And Netflix, because of how well HUSH has done, said, ‘We’re really interested in this, and we’d like to do it the way you want to do it.’

And that eliminated the pressure of having to test-screen the movie and define the demographic that’s going to watch it—all of that stuff that typically comes into the conversation when you’re trying to figure out how to market a film for a wide theatrical release. It just cleared the table, so that I can make the movie I want to make. I’m hoping very much that we can get that movie up on its feet soon.

Obviously, this isn't a solid confirmation yet, but if Flanagan and Netflix team on the project, it might see the light of day in the best possible form. It's a challenging bit of source material, but I'm excited to see what they come up with.

The 1992 novel GERALD'S GAME is about:

a woman who accidentally kills her husband while she is handcuffed to a bed, and, following the subsequent realization that she is trapped with little hope of rescue, begins to let the voices inside her head take over.