A Really Weird Stephen King TV Adaptation Is In The Works

[thunderball]

The last couple of years have delivered a whole lot of Stephen King on both the big screen and the small screen. Now, another Stephen King story will be adapted for TV, and it sounds like one of the weirdest to date. A television version of The Bone Church is in the works courtesy of King and the Cedar Park Entertainment production studio.

If you haven't heard of The Bone Church, don't feel too bad. Unlike Stephen King's famous works like IT, The Shining, and Carrie, The Bone Church isn't even a novel. Rather, it's a narrative poem penned by the author back in the 60s. It was ultimately published in the Bazaar of Bad Dreams anthology after revisions.

 

In the poem, an expedition journeys into a the depth of a massive jungle on a quest to find the legendary Bone Church. Led by a bold adventurer, the party finds a secret that was never meant to be discovered by strangers. Of the 32 people who embarked on the journey, only three survived, and one of them is narrating the poem. The work is formatted in a way that the survivor tells his story in a bar to anybody who will buy him a drink and listen.

Basically, The Bone Church probably won't feature any creepy clowns or be able to continue indefinitely unless the TV show takes some serious liberties with the source material. After all, there won't be a whole lot of suspense about the fates of the travelers if we already know that only a few of them will survive. That said, plenty of Stephen King adaptations have taken major liberties with his writing, and it's possible that the Bone Church show could be designed as an ongoing project instead of a limited series.

The Bone Church will be adapted by the Cedar Park Entertainment production studio, according to Deadline. The company is headed up Chris Long and David Ayer. This new project marks the second on which Long helps adapt a Stephen King project, as he was an executive producer on Audience Network's hit series Mr. Mercedes. Long left Audience to form the Cedar Park production company with Ayer, who is best known recently for his directing work on Bright and Suicide Squad. Both men have experience with genre stories and King clearly approves of how Long handles his material; The Bone Church could turn out to be one of the most intriguing Stephen King adaptations to date.

Interestingly, the announcement of The Bone Church as an adaptation comes shortly before the premiere of Castle Rock on Hulu, which will borrow bits and pieces from various Stephen King projects to form an anthology series. Perhaps the separate series means that we won't get any elements of The Bone Church in Castle Rock. That said, there are no details currently available about when The Bone Church will premiere or on what platform it will be found, so we may not want to rule anything out.

For what you can watch while we wait for more news on The Bone Church, be sure to swing by our midseason TV premiere schedule and our 2018 Netflix premiere guide.