Stephen King's The Life Of Chuck Is Being Adapted By Mike Flanagan With Mark Hamill And Tom Hiddleston Starring
If you thought Mike Flanagan was done with Stephen King adaptations ... buddy, have I got some news for you. Not only is the writer/director working on bringing "The Dark Tower" to some form of TV series format, but it was also just announced that he will be writing, directing, and producing an adaptation of the recent King novella "The Life of Chuck" and he has attached a ridiculously hot cast already.
Per the break at Deadline, Tom Hiddleston will be playing the title character of Chuck, a man who discovered he is terminally ill at only 39 years old, and Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, will be playing Albie, Chuck's grandfather who may or may not be seeing ghosts in his house.
The adaptation will be produced by Flanagan's Intrepid Pictures and FilmNation is handling international sales with the project ready to hit the Cannes marketplace. Deadline says the production has cited "The Green Mile," "The Shawshank Redemption," and "Stand By Me" as touchstones for this adaptation, which has been in the works for months and, reportedly, has a completed script.
This would be the first time Flanagan has worked with Tom Hiddleston and the second time he's worked with Hamill, who will star in the filmmaker's "House of Usher" which is expected to drop on Netflix sometime this year.
Things get real weird in this story
"The Life of Chuck" was one of four novellas published in King's recent collection "If It Bleeds," and it is by far the most surreal of them all. I don't want to ruin things for you if you've never read the story, but I will say that it's unlike any previous Stephen King story, although you can feel the author's trademark talent at fleshing out real characters even while the story goes into some borderline Charlie Kaufman/"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" areas.
The story is told in three stages, one stage is a world on the brink of collapse and you don't know why and in parallel is the story of Chuck. When we meet him he's dying and the story goes backward from there, all the way back to his childhood and his relationship with his grandparents, including his ghost-seeing grandpa.
Interestingly enough, Darren Aronofsky's production company, Protozoa Pictures, was the first to option this story, although it seems their option lapsed and King has now trusted it to Flanagan after the success of his previous adaptations, "Gerald's Game" and "Doctor Sleep."
The interesting thing about Mike Flanagan is he seems to specialize in adapting notoriously difficult-to-adapt King properties. "Gerald's Game" was thought unfilmable for a long time because almost the entire story takes place in the mind of a woman handcuffed to a bed and "Doctor Sleep" had the impossible task of bringing together Stephen King's world and Stanley Kubrick's iconic cinematic (if not terribly faithful) adaptation. He knocked both out of the park and now he's tasked with this odd-ball title.
As a major King fan, I can't think of someone better for the job.