One Stephen King Story Has Three Canceled Adaptations (And It Makes Sense)

Stephen King's massive body of work is a gold mine for Hollywood, to the point where there is never not some sort of movie adaptation of King's books in development any given moment. Of course, not every King novel enjoys the same amount of love from Hollywood; for every book like "Carrie" with its constant remakes, there's a book like "The Eyes of the Dragon," which has never gotten a movie adaptation in the 40 years since it's been published. The book is a surprisingly family-friendly fantasy adventure story, one with a few fun connections to King's famous "Dark Tower" series. 

The first attempt to adapt "The Eyes of the Dragon" came in 2000, when the French company WAMC Entertainment reportedly bought the rights and planned to turn it into an animated film. Ideally the film would've had a budget of $45 million and would've been released in the early 2000s, but the production stalled out and WAMC eventually lost the rights to the book.

The second attempt came in 2012, when the Syfy channel announced they were planning to turn "The Eyes of the Dragon" into a miniseries. This project too fizzled out with little explanation. The third attempt came in 2019, when Hulu announced it was adapting the book into a TV show. But the next year, producer/screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith sadly announced that Hulu had canceled the project. It's not clear if COVID was the big element that killed the project (like it was for so many other movies and shows), but it certainly didn't help.

As of today, there are no plans anywhere to adapt "The Eyes of the Dragon," and even if there were, there'd be no guarantee those plans wouldn't fall apart within a year once again. What's the deal here? Why is it so uniquely difficult to get an adaptation off the ground?

"The Eyes of the Dragon" was first published in the '80s, at a time where Stephen King was on top of the world, and it was immediately overshadowed by all the other recent bestsellers he'd published. Around the same period this book came out, he'd also published "Pet Sematary," "It," "Christine," a "Dark Tower" book, and the short story collection "Skeleton Crew." This was a period where many of King's best-ever novels were published in rapid succession, which makes "The Eyes of the Dragon" look even worse in comparison. 

What's the problem with it? Well, the characters aren't that memorable, nor is the fantasy setting all that fleshed out. It was also off-brand for King at the time; he was known as a horror writer, not a high fantasy writer, and the general consensus on "Eyes of the Dragon" was that King was better off sticking in his familiar lane. Perhaps most troubling of all is that "Eyes of the Dragon" was supposed to be a children's book. The cutesy, innocent vibes of the story were not what King fans expected or wanted from him. 

This wouldn't be that big of an issue if King had fully embraced capturing the children's market, but he didn't do that either. He wrote in the book's foreword that he wanted to write a story for his young daughter to enjoy, but a significant portion of the first act focuses on the adult character Roland and his marital struggles with erectile dysfunction. (Or maybe Roland's supposed to be gay; I could never quite figure that part out.) 

The result was a book that wasn't quite for adults and wasn't quite for children, existing in an awkward middle ground that's not easy to market. Will there ever be a finished "Eyes of the Dragon" adaptation? I don't know, but if there is it'll likely never reach the heights in popularity that his other, more adult works enjoyed.