Mike Flanagan no longer directing Stephen King’s Revival adaptation

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

On a recent episode of the podcast The Company of the Mind, while talking with The Stand director John Boone, director Mike Flanagan (Doctor Sleep) revealed that he's no longer developing a feature adaptation of Stephen King's Revival, which Boone had also at one point been attached to.

Here's the pertinent excerpt from the podcast:

[The Stand director Josh Boone and I] started emailing because I went on to eBay to buy a limited edition of Revival – a beautiful set of Revival, and Josh was selling it. I bought it, and he emailed me on eBay first when the transaction first started, like, ‘Uhhh, hi.’ ‘Oh my god!’ And so we got to go back and forth about Revival, being a project that Josh was doing first and then I also ended up not doing Revival. So we have that in common; we’ve both been through the ringer on that particular story.

And here's the official synopsis of King's Revival:

In a small New England town, over half a century ago, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister. Charles Jacobs, along with his beautiful wife, will transform the local church. The men and boys are all a bit in love with Mrs. Jacobs; the women and girls feel the same about Reverend Jacobs—including Jamie’s mother and beloved sister, Claire. With Jamie, the Reverend shares a deeper bond based on a secret obsession. When tragedy strikes the Jacobs family, this charismatic preacher curses God, mocks all religious belief, and is banished from the shocked town.

Jamie has demons of his own. Wed to his guitar from the age of thirteen, he plays in bands across the country, living the nomadic lifestyle of bar-band rock and roll while fleeing from his family’s horrific loss. In his mid-thirties—addicted to heroin, stranded, desperate—Jamie meets Charles Jacobs again, with profound consequences for both men. Their bond becomes a pact beyond even the Devil’s devising, and Jamie discovers that revival has many meanings.

Meanwhile, Flanagan's next project – the Netflix horror series Midnight Mass – just wrapped production, with no official release date as of yet.

So what do you guys think? Fans of the King story? If so, who would you now like to see tackle a feature film adaptation? Either way, sound off below!