Back in the 1980s people had a really bad habit of making adaptations of every Stephen King book. Sure, we all remember The Shining, Stand By Me, and Pet Sematary as success stories, but not all of them were exactly immediate classics. One such movie was Firestarter, a film starring a very young Drew Barrymore as a a young girl who can set fires with her mind. The movie was a one-off, making only a little more than its budget back at the box office, but modern day producers don't see things like that.
Variety reports that Universal is now planning to bring back the King property and, what's more, they're planning to turn it into a franchise. Mark L. Smith, who wrote the 2007 Luke Wilson-Kate Beckinsale starrer Vacancy, will write the script adaptation. The new movie is expected to be loosely based on the original King story, with the lead character "reinvented with a little more edge."
While Firestarter is a project that people probably won't slit their wrists over when they hear its being remade, I must say that the whole "more edge" thing does trouble me a bit. When you consider that Barrymore was only nine when the first film was made, this makes me think that they are planning on raising the character's age (what kid under 10 do you know with "edge"?) which just can't be good. Sure, there have been some crappy Stephen King adaptations over the years, but let's hope that they aren't planning to make a Twilight-like series with the word "vampire" replaced by "pyrokinetic". The world just doesn't need that right now.
