Universal Pictures has found a writer for its big screen adaptation of Stephen King’s ‘The Tommyknockers’ in Jeremy Slater. Unfortunately, Slater’s track record has caused King fans to question his suitability of handling this project, with one film, in particular, being singled out a huge smudge– 2015’s ‘Fantastic Four’. 20th Century Fox essentially had to make a new ‘FF’ movie to keep the rights to the property from reverting to Marvel Studios, so with a script by Slater, with contributions by Simon Kinberg and director Josh Trank, Fox unleashed one of the most horribly received comic book movies in memory.
The film bore little resemblance to the comic book source material but had a bloated budget and an inexperienced director in Trank. The young cast was composed of highly-regarded up-and-comers Jamie Bell, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara and Miles Teller, but none turned in their best performance and the film was… er, doomed before it even hit theaters.
With Slater now taking on another high-profile project with ‘The Tommyknockers’ he took to Twitter and took the opportunity to once again apologize for the 2015 trainwreck.
And when I finally got my foot in the door, I only had three dream projects on my bucket list. One was Marvel (umm…sorry about that one, guys), one was Star Wars, and the third, of course, was Stephen King. Any one of those jobs would let me die a happy man. 3/
— Jeremy Slater (@jerslater) August 16, 2018
It’s a small apology, but there’s not much more to be said. The movie came and went and now, with Disney acquiring Fox and the rights to ‘FF’, Marvel Studios is likely to introduce a new take on comics’ First Family that will be sure to please fans.
Following the ‘Fantastic Four’ debacle, Slater created FOX’s ‘The Exorcist’ TV series which ran for two seasons. He also created Netflix’s upcoming ‘The Umbrella Academy’ based on Dark Horse’s award winning comic book series.
Are you willing to let bygones be bygones and give Slater’s ‘The Tommyknockers’ a shot?
