It was only a matter of time before the Hollywood adaptation machine turned its attention to The Talisman, Stephen King and Peter Straub’s 1984 novel about a young boy on a quest to save his mother that has him journeying through the American heartland and a dangerous, alternate version of our own world in order to recover a powerful crystal.
The adaptation of the novel is being penned by The Fault in our Stars director Josh Boone, who’s currently hard at work on X-Men spinoff movie The New Mutants. The adaptation of The Talisman was initially envisioned as a television series, but it’s now being developed as a movie.
Frank Marshall (Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark) will produce the film with Amblin Entertainment, and Variety reports that Boone might end up directing the movie in addition to penning the script.
“Twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer embarks on an epic quest — a walk from the seacoast of New Hampshire to the California coast — to find the talisman that will save his dying mother’s life,” reads the official synopsis of the story on King’s website. “Jack’s journey takes him into the Territories, a parallel medieval universe, where most people from his own universe have analogs called ‘twinners.’ The queen of the Territories, Jack’s mother’s twinner, is also dying.”
Boone is no stranger to King’s projects, having worked on a new adaptation of the author’s popular saga The Stand, and later being chosen by King himself to pen the script for an adaptation of his 2014 novel Revival. The latter project is still in development, but the adaptation of The Stand seems to have stalled out. Boone’s X-Men spinoff movie New Mutants is currently scheduled to hit theaters in April 2018.
King has had a busy year when it comes to adaptations of his work, with features based on The Dark Tower and It both hitting theaters, and with the latter already the highest-grossing horror movie of all time in U.S. theaters. On the small screen, an adaptation of his novel Mr. Mercedes was renewed for a second season on Audience Network, and the upcoming Hulu series Castle Rock — which blends together the worlds of multiple stories penned by King — is filming now.
