The Only Movie Stephen King Ever Directed Is Streaming For Free

Stephen King has written over 60 novels and countless short stories, but he's only directed one movie: "Maximum Overdrive," which was released in theaters in 1986. Starring Emilio Estevez as cook/ex-convict Bill Robinson, the film asks the question we've all wondered at some point: "What if machines came to life and started killing people?" One character gets killed by a vending machine shooting a soda can at him, while a child gets flattened by a sentient steamroller. It's all reminiscent of that one scene in the 2007 "Transformers" movie where the Allspark cube brings the surrounding machine to life, except in "Maximum Overdrive," that 20-second sequence is the whole film.

If you want to watch "Maximum Overdrive," you can do so now at Tubi, a free streaming service where you pay by watching ads. You can also watch it on the Roku channel or Pluto TV, and if you want to skip the ads, you can pay $3.99 on services like Google Play Movies or Apple TV+. You can also get a MovieSphere+ free trial on Amazon and watch it there. Whereas some old films are near-impossible to watch today (you'd have to jump through a million hoops to get your hands on, say, a legal copy of David Lynch's masterpiece "Wild At Heart"), there are no shortage of easy ways to check out "Maximum Overdrive." 

Why is "Maximum Overdrive" so easy to watch? Well, it's mainly because the movie's ... not very good.

Maximum Overdrive was so bad that King disowned it

"Maximum Overdrive" has a Rotten Tomatoes score of only 14% and an IMDb rating of 5.4/10. That latter score isn't actually that bad, especially considering IMDb's well-documented bias against the horror genre, but the most damning rating came from Stephen King himself. "The problem with that film is that I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and I really didn't know what I was doing. I learned a lot from the experience, however, and I would like to try directing again some time," he explained in an interview for the 2003 book "Hollywood's Stephen King" by Tony Magistrale.

Sadly, King has never directed another film since then. While failure may be the best teacher when it comes to learning a skill, as time went on, it seemed like King came to consider "Maximum Overdrive" such a failure that the only lesson was to never direct again. Perhaps it was better for him to stick with his writing, where he has an intuitive understanding of how every scene should be written and paced. As an author, King has a knack for understanding how and when to dive into a character's perspective or vividly describe things while still staying true to a character's personality. As a director, meanwhile, King seemed to flail 24/7. As his production assistant Chip Hacker once explained:

"Stephen King had a very strong idea about the movie, but he was not able to translate it into images, you know what I mean? I do think writing and directing are very different talents, and it's hard enough to be good at one of them."

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