Stephen King Disowned This Movie Adaptation Now Streaming On Prime Video

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Stephen King is a prolific author and his works have been turned into movies many, many times over the years — and he has varying feelings on many of these works. For instance, King famously hated Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of "The Shining." But one particular adaptation ticked the author off so much that he actually sued to have his name taken off of it. Now, you can watch the Stephen King movie that the man himself disowned.

Streaming now in Prime Video, director Brett Leonard's 1992 movie "The Lawnmower Man" is a very loose take on King's short story of the same name, which was famously included in the "Night Shift" collection. The short story is about a suburban man who hires a peculiar landscaper to mow his overgrown lawn, which devolves into a strange and violent encounter. The movie is something else entirely.

The movie as we know it centers on Dr. Lawrence Angelo (Pierce Brosnan) who puts intellectually disabled landscaper, Jobe Smith (Jeff Fahey), on a regimen of experimental pills and computer-simulated training sequences to augment his intelligence. It works, but Jobe also develops psychic powers and realizes he's been taken advantage of his whole life. Revenge soon follows.

King sued to have his name removed from "The Lawnmower Man," because it was sold by New Line Cinema as "Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man," even though the movie itself didn't at all resemble the story he originally wrote. King expressed his irritation to the Los Angeles Times in 1992:

"It's the biggest rip-off that you could imagine because there's nothing of me in there. It just makes me furious. My name shouldn't be on it...They're interested in exploiting me. My work is being strip-mined by the same studio that gave us the 'Ninja Turtles.'"

Stephen King won the lawsuit and settled for $2.5 million (per AFI Catalog) but New Line still marketed the initial home video release with the author's name intact. It was an ugly situation. Be that as it may, "The Lawnmower Man" was still hugely successful in its day, making $32 million at the domestic box office against a $10 million budget. However, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

"It made, in all markets, $250 million (that's including foreign markets, ancillary and everything)," director Brett Leonard revealed in an interview with /Film in 2016. "This was the number one independent film of 1992. The number one New Line film of that year. People call it a 'cult film.' It's a cult film in its concept, but it was very much a mainstream independent film from a financial standpoint."

The movie itself is very much a relic of its time, as the visual effects don't hold up to modern scrutiny, to put it kindly. It also features a pre-James Bond Pierce Brosnan in one of his stranger roles. The movie also got a sequel, " Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace," which was not successful. In 2017, it was reported that "The Lawnmower Man" was being made into a virtual reality series, but that never came to pass. There are much better Stephen King movies out there and there are probably worse ones one could name, but this is perhaps the strangest one to ever come about, so maybe go check it out on Prime Video if you're so inclined.

You can grab a copy of Stephen King's "Night Shift" from Amazon.