Stephen King's works have been popular as source material for films for as long as he has been writing. There have been some great King adaptations and some terrible King adaptations. They have remained so popular over the decades that several of his books have seen multiple film adaptations, and several more are already planned. It seems there's always at least one upcoming Stephen King movie on the horizon. One King book that has been adapted once, and will be again, is Cujo, and one of the biggest questions about the remake is how the new movie will end.
Cujo is the story of the titular dog who contracts rabies and then goes to terrorize its family. The story was first adapted on film in 1983, starring Dee Wallace as Donna Trenton and Danny Pintauro as her son Tad. In a recent appearance on the Still Here Hollywood podcast, Wallace says Cujo is her favorite of the movies she made. Though she initially objected to the book’s original ending in which the boy is killed by the dog. Wallace said…
The movie is very different from the book. The dog's possessed by a demon and the kid dies. And when they brought me aboard, I said, 'The kid can't die.'
Cujo is a pretty harrowing book that sees mother and son trapped in a car while a rabid St. Bernard tries to murder them. It’s an emotionally taxing story, which makes the fact that a child dies in the end truly heartbreaking to anybody emotionally invested in the story. Wallace said that considering many in the film audience wouldn’t be ready for that sort of ending, the movie just needed to change the ending. She continued…
It's [the] 1980s and you can't put everybody through what we're gonna put them through. Half the people aren't gonna have read the book that come to see the movie.
Most stories certainly have happy endings, and nearly all movies do. While dark endings are far from unheard of, they are rare. Movies attract a more general audience than books, and so story elements in book-to-movie adaptations are often changed to make things more palatable.
Most in the audience were probably happy that Cujo had something resembling a happy ending, in that at least the main characters survived. Stephen King, who generally doesn’t like it when his stories are drastically changed for film, was actually surprisingly ok with the change to Cujo. According to Wallace, the author received an incredibly negative response to his original ending, and was thus glad the movie didn't follow suit. She said…
Stephen King wrote us after Cujo and said, 'Thank God you didn't kill the kid at the end. I've never gotten more hate mail for anything else I've done.'
Of course, this leads to the question of what to do with the new Cujo remake coming to Netflix. Our own Stephen King expert Eric Eisenberg has suggested the new Cujo should keep the book’s ending. If nothing else, it would give the new movie a significant way to differentiate itself from the previous version. However, then Stephen King, and Netflix, may need to get ready for some hate mail.
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