Stephen King is a pop culture institution unto himself in Hollywood. One of my favorite statistics I like to regularly cite is the fact that since the release of Brian DePalma’s Carrie in 1976, there have only been nine individual calendar years without at least one new King movie or television adaptation premiering or a new season of an on-going King series. The past year, however, has been special. In 2025, a remarkable total of six new King film and TV projects were given an official release – some ranking among the best Stephen King movies of all time and the best Stephen King TV projects of all time – and they collectively reflect the special range that the legendary author has as a storyteller.
With the opportunity to reflect on the entirety of everything, it can unequivocally be said that 2025 stands right alongside 1983 (the year of Cujo, The Dead Zone and Christine) as one of the best years ever for Stephen King movies and TV, but how do the individual projects size up when compared to one another? Now that IT: Welcome To Derry has completed its first season, I’m ready to declare my rankings – and so, I’m doing so for this week’s edition of The King Beat. If you haven’t seen everything yet, be wary of spoilers, but with that said, let’s dig in!
6. The Running Man
If you had told me at the start of 2025 that I would ultimately regard The Running Man as my least favorite Stephen King adaptation of the year, I would have called you nuts. The novel on which the film is based is one of my favorites in the author’s bibliography, and I’ve long trusted the special skills of writer/director Edgar Wright. At the end of the day, though, I’m not ranking the movie last on this list because I hated it; on the contrary, I mostly liked it – hence my 3.5 star review of the film published last month. The simple reason I liked it least of all the 2025 King movies and TV titles is because the ending is absolutely terrible.
In the run up to the release of the film, I personally vacillated about whether or not I wanted the movie to directly adapt the source material’s exceptionally dark third act, and I ultimately figured that the movie would just find a way to soften it a touch so that it could still be respectable. Instead, the last three scenes are WTF-level bad, and the bad taste that it leaves in your mouth sours what is otherwise a solid and faithful take on the great Stephen King book.
5. The Institute
Premiering during the summer on MGM+, The Institute is a series that took half-a-decade in development to get made, and it arrived with what can be called the least amount of fanfare among 2025 Stephen King adaptations. The book on which it’s based is not what will be remembered as one of the author’s masterpieces, but the series sticks to the source material and does make some smart choices for expansion. It’s good-not-great – but because it didn’t at any point actively enrage me while I was watching it, the show gets saved from the bottom of this ranking.
For Stephen King fans like me, the hook of the show is obvious (read: I will watch anything that is adapted from King’s work), but it’s missing one for anyone who isn’t a Constant Reader. The Institute has a compelling plot courtesy of the novel – following a group of kidnapped, psychically-gifted kids as they work to escape a shadowy facility running experiments – but it never unleashes an aspect that makes it a must recommend. There are no devastating and/or unexpected plot twists, and there aren’t any performances that wow. In the grander legacy of King on TV, I’d put it on the level of the Dead Zone series starring Anthony Michael Hall, but perhaps it will find some ways to improve in its announced second season.
4. The Monkey
Comedy is not really one of Stephen King’s fortes. This isn’t to say that he isn’t funny, as there are many books I could point to that had me laughing out loud while reading. At the same time, it’s never really been a true focus, as none of his novels can be described as a humor-first work. A side effect of this is that there really aren’t many King adaptations that can be described as comedies… which I suppose makes Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey the first, and, by default, the best.
Sandwiched between the tales of extreme darkness that are Longlegs and Keeper in Perkins’ filmography, The Monkey is an outlier for the filmmaker tonally, but it’s a devilishly successful experiment. Every human lives with the knowledge that death can be waiting for us around every corner, and this movie treats that reality as the sick joke that it is – examining death and loss that just so happens to be instigated when a toy simian gets wound up and starts banging on a drum. If it weren’t for an antagonist plot that feels too rushed (no fault of star Theo James, who does great work in a dual performance), it would easily compete for one of top two spots in this ranking.
3. IT: Welcome To Derry
I had my worries about IT: Welcome To Derry. The fact that Bill Skarsgård was a late addition to the cast made me question how much we would get to see of the legendary Pennywise, and early previews made me wonder if the show was falling in one of the same traps that plagued IT: Chapter Two – which is to say trying to recreate the magic of the young Losers Club instead of crafting something new. Now that all eight episodes of Season 1 have aired, I’m thrilled that my concerns proved to be unwarranted, as the HBO series very much has an energy of its own and executes some tremendous canon expansion.
Prequel storytelling is inherently difficult because of the effect that the setting has on stakes (the fates of certain characters, etc.), but IT: Welcome To Derry successfully circumvents the challenge by deepening the lore and introducing an absolutely wonderful collection of original protagonists facing off against the most iconic evil clown in pop culture. It needs to also be said that it honors the oldest Stephen King legacy of them all as a pure horror series, as it unleashes a torrent of unforgettable terrors in every single episode.
2. The Life Of Chuck
When discussing adaptations of his work, Stephen King likes to reference his first editor, Bill Thompson, who liked to say, “Steve has a movie camera in his head.” I sometimes wonder if writer/director Mike Flanagan has magically somehow gotten a hold of that camera, because that would help explain his incredible gift for capturing the author’s work in adaptation. He already had two of the best King movies of all time on his filmography going into this year with Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep, and in 2025, he added a third with The Life Of Chuck.
Perhaps the most spectacular thing about The Life Of Chuck is that when you read the novella on which it’s based, it doesn’t read as cinematic at all, and yet, it’s Flanagan’s most faithful adaptation of King’s work to date, and it’s a wonder. As small and insignificant as anybody may feel on a given day, the reality is that there is epic, spontaneous and remarkable beauty in our world, and each and every one of us possesses a grand reality unto ourselves. It’s heady subject matter presented in a complex fashion (in three connected-but-disparate acts that play out in reverse chronological order), but the strength of the vision Flanagan inherits from King is a life-affirming spectacle.
1. The Long Walk
I never thought that I would see the day. That’s the phrase that instantly springs to mind when I think about Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk. Between the unrelenting bleakness of the narrative (ultimately seeing 49 young men executed because they’ve lost a game) and unique production challenges (having an entire cast perform every take while in perpetual motion), I didn’t believe for a long time that any modern studio would give an adaptation a production budget let alone release it. This year, however, it finally came together, and it’s both one of the best Stephen King movies of all time and the best King adaptation of 2025.
With a less competent directorial vision and a lesser script than the excellent work of JT Mollner, The Long Walk could either be brutally unwatchable or a total snore, but the movie soars principally because it understands the great strength of Stephen King stories: establishing complex and relatable characters and dropping them in extreme circumstances. Ray Garraty and Peter McVries, phenomenally brought to life by stars Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, express a deep humanity in the bond of friendship that they form while meeting in competition, and that’s what gives power to its crushing ending – which is shockingly even darker than what’s in King’s novel. It’s a marvel.
Looking into the immediate future, it can be said that 2026 won’t be nearly as exciting for Stephen King fans as 2025 was, as the only upcoming Stephen King project set to premiere is Mike Flanagan’s Carrie limited series for Amazon Prime Video. That being said, every week always offers up new and exciting developments from King’s world, and I plan to be here on CinemaBlend every Thursday in the new year with a fresh edition of The King Beat to explore all of it.
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