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According to this story at Cinema Blend, there’s going to be a remake of the 1984 Drew Barrymore movie Firestarter.

Firestarter is a fair-to-middlin’ (mostly middlin’) adaptation of one of my favorite early Stephen King novels. The book, published in 1980, concerns a young girl who can set fires just by thinking about it. It’s a gripping novel, and I remember thinking, when I saw the movie, that it would have been more effective if the special effects had been better.

It’s a pretty sure bet that the effects in the remake will be better. They’ll be mostly CG, I suspect, but it’s safe to assume they’ll look spectacular. Of course, if the remake can’t lick the original movie’s other big problem — a flat, uninteresting screenplay — there’s really no point.

Stephen King has not been as well served by Hollywood as he ought to be. For every really good adaptation — Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, Kubrick’s The Shining, the first ‘Salem’s Lot TV miniseries (which I talked about here) – there are several mediocre movies, and a handful of downright awful ones. Let’s hope the new Firestarter is one of the good ones.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 4th, 2011 at 4:03 am and is filed under Fantasy, Movies, Reading the Screen, sf. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.