Pet Sematary Climbs Out Of The Grave At Paramount

Stephen King continues to have a bumper year, with no less than four films based on his stories coming out in 2017 alone. Now Variety is reporting that another property is being queued up over at Paramount to come back out of the grave for another go-around: Pet Sematary. The directing duo of Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kolsch have been tapped to take the center seat on the project.

Both men have had only nominal feature experience, with their main work having been 2014’s video-on-demand release of Starry Eyes, which was funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign. It’s a somewhat surprising move, given that It director Andy Muschietti had recently expressed a strong interest in picking up the project himself.

Jeff Buhler and David Kajganich have written the screenplay, and Alexandra Loewy is executive producing.

This new project would be the second film adaptation of King’s 1983 novel. The first film was released in 1989 and spawned a sequel, the not-too-creatively titled Pet Sematary Two, which hit screens in 1992. While the first was met with mixed reviews, currently standing at 48% on Rotten Tomatoes, the latter didn’t hold up nearly so well, landing well under 30%.

It was always an unfortunate result, given that Sematary regularly ranks among King’s top 10 books. Hopefully as we hear more about the project this time around the result will be more in line with the quality of the source material.