However, not every King book has been lucky enough to earn a screen adaptation. For a variety of reasons, many of King’s works, from The Eyes of the Dragon and The Stand to Insomnia and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, are considered hard or even outright impossible to adapt. Despite this reticence, even these novels could make great movies or TV shows in the right hands.
The Eyes of the Dragon
It is fairly easy to see why King’s 1984 novel The Eyes of the Dragon has long been considered hard to adapt, and it has nothing to do with the book’s story. A straightforward fantasy book, The Eyes of the Dragon is set in a Medieval era realm known as Delain. There, King Roland the Good and his wife Queen Sasha are embroiled in a power struggle with the King’s nefarious Royal Advisor, Flagg.
That name will be familiar to fans of other King books, but one of the biggest surprises in The Eyes of the Dragon is that the book remains a traditional epic fantasy throughout and lacks any of the straightforward horror tropes that made the author famous. In a time when The Running Man’s box office under-performance was blamed in part on King’s reputation as a horror writer rather than a sci-fi author, it’s easy to see why executives balk at the thought of adapting his fantasy novel. However, the inventive, immersive The Eyes of the Dragon would still make a great standalone fantasy movie.
The Stand
It might seem strange to list The Stand among King’s infamously unfilmable novels, since the author’s biggest book to date has already been adapted as a TV miniseries not once, but twice. However, both 1994’s miniseries adaptation and 2020’s disastrous CBS All Access version of the story only contributed to the idea that The Stand is too sprawling, too multi-faceted, and too ambitious to be faithfully brought to life onscreen.
Indeed, after 2020’s miniseries couldn’t effectively condense the post-apocalyptic doorstopper’s unique blend of character drama, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and social realism across its nine episodes, it is tough to see how director Doug Liman’s upcoming movie adaptation hopes to do with a far shorter runtime. That said, The Stand still has the potential to be a great multi-season TV series if producers were simply willing to give its lengthy story more room to breathe, which was the fateful failure of both its earlier screen versions.
Insomnia
Released in 1994, Insomnia is a King novel that, like It, its 2025 prequel series It: Welcome to Derry, and Dreamcatcher, takes place in Derry, Maine. The book’s plot concerns Ralph Roberts, a retiree who gains the ability to see people’s auras. This power allows him to see their fates, as well as the tiny “Little bald doctors” who seemingly exist to manipulate and shape their life paths.
As the above synopsis implies, Insomnia is a weird, weird book. A lot of it takes place inside the mind of its hero, and it is not entirely clear how tight his grasp on reality is. However, if the works of David Lynch and Darren Aronofsky have taught viewers anything, it is that trippy stories which take place in the minds of their protagonists can be just as compelling and immersive onscreen as they are on the page.
The Library Policeman
A novella from King’s 1990 collection Four Past Midnight, “The Library Policeman” follows a businessman’s attempts to face an overwhelming childhood trauma by visiting his local library. One particularly shocking scene from “The Library Policeman” deals with highly sensitive subject matter, leading many readers to assume the story could not be tastefully adapted to the screen. However, Mike Flanagan’s movie version of Gerald’s Game managed to address similarly intense and upsetting material from the source story while still providing viewers with a compelling King adaptation that never felt exploitative or gratuitous.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Released in 1999, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a survival horror that sees nine-year-old Trisha wander off during a walk in the woods and end up stranded in the depths of the wilderness. Various planned adaptations of the novel have been developed and cancelled, from a 2005 version that would have been directed by George A. Romero to director Lynne Ramsay’s mooted 2020 adaptation.
Since almost all of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon takes place inside the mind of a child who is growing rapidly more dehydrated, exhausted, and delirious, it is easy to see why readers thought the book would be tough to realise onscreen. However, the news that The Long Walk’s JT Mollner is working on a movie adaptation should be celebrated. This Stephen King story, with its largely internal narrative, could work onscreen if its plot is approached in a sufficiently unconventional, trippy way.
